Thursday, May 15, 2008
An Amazing Man Portrayed by a Master
Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains is an upclose look at Dr. Paul Farmer: physician, anthropologist, public health expert, and friend of Haiti and the rest of the developing world. Kidder has the skill of bringing the reader into his subject's world with the power, skill, and many of the tools of the novelist. There is a recent interview in the Huffington Post about Mountains Beyond Mountains (several years after its publication. This is a book that will continue to have a very long tail, I believe) where Mark Klempner quotes Kidder: "A priest friend of mine who once said to me, "When you cross the path of a certain kind of person, you ought to really pay attention."" And this also summarizes the way I felt about the experience of reading Mountains. It was a a moving experience where the reader gets close to a singular vision to healing, doctoring, that has resulted with his organization Partners in Health making an impact on the world.
Mountains explores both the stories of Farmer and Partners in Health. PIH was able to create the method and find the means of treating multi-drug resistant TB and pioneered efforts to give drug treatment to AIDS patients in Haiti when such an approach was unpopular and deemed a waste of time. The small efforts of Partners In Health have led to acceptance of their methods by the world health community at large.
I was surprised how riveted I was with a book that is basically about eliminating infectious disease and poverty. I give a lot of the credit to Kidder and his way of getting into his subject. But the credit has to also be given to this extraordinary person. In the four years since the book has come out, Partners in Health has expanded their work, partly due to the exposure Kidder has given them. According to the May 4 CBS 60 Minutes profile on Paul Farmer, PIH's budget is now $50 million (but how many movies are made with more than that?) with more workers and more countries being served. PIH's model of community health workers doing follow-up has begun in the United States.
What makes Farmer run? Partly it is his dedication to what sounds like a basic and fundamental premise for. He told 60 Minutes "Everybody should have access to medical care. And it shouldn't be such a big deal."
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:51 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment