Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.

Paul Farmer is a physician, anthropologist & prophet of social justice. He combines an unflinching moral stance - that the poor deserve health care just as much as the rich do - with scientific expertise & boundless dedication.

Pathologies of Power, written before "tè tranble" (the trembling of the earth) provides both global health experts and lay readers alike with gripping first hand accounts of this remarkable doctor's work in Haiti, Africa and the United States. Farmer, an eloquent Harvard Medical School professor, describes his work providing medical care in some of the most neglected and abused populations on earth. Pathologies opens up a broad landscape to navigate regarding possibilities for global health workers and allied professionals. Those interested in alleviating the pain by those who are effected by disease, lack of nutrition, and horrific political and economic circumstances will find Farmers book a useful tool in identifying problems they will encounter in their work. ( )

I bought this book after a discussion here on LT of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and Dr. Paul Farmer, the author, who is the founder of Partners in Health as well as the subject of Mountains beyond Mountains.

It is powerful, moving, and difficult-to-read: difficult to read both because of the human suffering depicted in its pages and because parts of it are quite a slog and somewhat repetitive. Dr. Farmer's basic arguments in the book are that health is a human right, but has not been treated as such by traditional human rights organizations; that poor people experience "structural violence" which makes them more likely to be sick, injured, etc., than people with more money; that poor sick people are better able to describe their needs than "experts;" that, following liberation theology, there should be a positive preference towards the poor, rather than the wealthy; and that very often treatments that are known not to work (e.g., anti-TB drugs that don't work on patients with multiple drug-resistant TB) are used for poor people (e.g., in Russian prisons) because the drugs that would work are deemed "not cost-effective."

The first part of the book, in which Farmer uses his experiences in Haiti, Chiapas, Guantanamo (this book was written pre-9/11 and the US prisons for suspected terrorists there, and deals with Haitians with AIDS who were imprisoned there, contrasted with AIDS treatment in Cuba), and Russia is the most compelling because Farmer is able to draw his principles from real experiences. The second part, which is more theoretical -- Farmer is both a doctor and an anthropologist -- is harder to read and for me less interesting.

This book certainly has led me to think differently about traditional foreign aid and the traditional way "donor nations" treat poorer countries. And, another outstanding aspect of the book is the many quotes from poets and other writers.

I've been meaning to read some Farmer for years now and finally got around to it. Gave me a whole new perspective on how the world works, and a new way to think about global inequality. ( )