Paul Farmer set out to cure the world – and came as close as any man

As a medical student, Paul Farmer visited Haiti. It changed him -and poor people in many countries had better lives as a result.

Paul Farmer was brilliant, passionate, kind, and humble, according to former US president Bill Clinton. Picture: Getty Images

Paul Edward Farmer, medical anthropologist, born October 26, 1959, in North Adams, Massachusetts. Died aged 62 in Butaro, Rwanda, on February 21.

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More people perform as mermaids at Florida’s Weeki Wachee aquarium than live in the tiny town. It has just 12 residents. Last week there were 15 mermaids.

But from one of the smallest towns in America came a man who changed his world. Indeed, he set out to cure it.

And, by the time he died suddenly, had gone further towards achieving that than anyone.

Paul Farmer’s life was intensely busy, as if he knew each day counted and that his budget of them would be less than most. But he always said he was a slow starter.

Indeed, he reckons he had not really heard of Haiti – just an hour or so away from Miami by plane – until he arrived at university.

But Haiti, its people, poverty and endless problems, would define his life.

Haiti is among the poorest parts of Earth, despite being off the coast of the wealthiest, and Farmer couldn’t understand why its inhabitants shouldn’t receive the best medical treatment that his fellow Floridians took for granted.

He described his first trip there in 1983, while still at medical school, as an “exercise in defeat”. He worked as a volunteer living with landless, peasant farmers displaced into a shelter because of a hydro-electric project.

Haiti needed the electricity it promised, no doubt, but the people of Cange, in Haiti’s highlands, ironically didn’t even have a clean water supply.

He returned the following year and set about changing things – lives in the main. By then, record numbers of Haitians were suffering from HIV with few medicines and fewer people who cared.

As people literally died around him, Farmer decided to act. Until then, health care was a privilege of the wealthy. Farmer could not see that some lives were worth less than others.

About that time he encountered a young, English volunteer, Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of author Roald Dahl. Together they formed a local organisation called Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health) with the aim of providing affordable health care to locals, but those who could not afford the treatments – provided for less than a dollar – were treated free. Today, it has a dozen sites across Haiti and employs 7000 locals.

Back in Boston, where he was a professor at the esteemed Harvard Medical School, Farmer and Dahl, with others, saw the potential of Partners In Health to work more widely to establish community health projects elsewhere. Partnering with other non-government organisations, and always with local health authorities, Partners In Health now builds healthcare systems from the ground up. Haiti was the model.

Late in 1994 Farmer took a call from a member of the Rwandan government. It was months after the genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people and left Rwanda the world’s poorest nation, with the lowest life expectancy, highest rates of death from HIV-AIDS, and worst infant mortality. No nation could be more broken.

Since then, and with programs built with Partners In Health, Rwanda has recorded the greatest healthcare turnaround of any country. It is still poor, and life there is difficult, but with a health system staffed locally and working hand-in-hand with Rwanda’s universities, things are improving.

Farmer always preferred the idea of “accompaniment” rather than aid – poor people would help themselves, as long as they could see how.

Farmer helped establish programs in Peru, Liberia, Mexico, Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Kazakhstan.

In 2010, an earthquake struck Haiti just outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, killing 200,000 and injuring 300,000. Farmer, by now married to a Haitian woman, Didi, and a father of three, responded in typical style – building the world’s biggest solar-powered hospital.

Former US president Bill Clinton said his family was devastated by Farmer’s death: “Paul was one of the most extraordinary people we have ever known. His pioneering work with Partners In Health touched millions of lives, advanced global health equity, and fundamentally changed the way health care is delivered in the most impoverished places on Earth.”

Clinton added that Farmer was brilliant, passionate, kind, and humble. “He saw every day as a new opportunity to teach, learn, give, and serve – and it was impossible to spend any amount of time with him and not feel the same.”

In a book he wrote about Farmer – who died of what is described as an acute cardiac event – author Tracy Kidder wrote: “Here was a person who seemed to be practising more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy.”