Dr. Paul Farmer, the co-founder of the Boston-based nonprofit Partners in Health (PIH), died on Monday. News reports say he passed in his sleep from a cardiac event while working in Rwanda, one of several countries that this remarkable man championed and assisted over his 62 years of life.

Dr. Farmer was also an esteemed figure here in the Commonwealth, where he was on staff at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In 2020, he was a key advisor to Gov. Charlie Baker as he led our state’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. PIH led the state’s contact tracing effort, a mammoth undertaking. This week, Gov. Baker said Farmer had been “a living legend” and credited PIH for “the work they did here in MA during some of the worst days of the pandemic.”

Farmer was particularly devoted to Haiti, where so much of his life was spent treating the poor of that island nation’s rural communities. It’s where he met his wife, Didi Bertrand, with whom he raised a family while also crisscrossing the globe on an urgent mission to bring equity and compassion to those living in the most hopeless of circumstances.

“We want to be able to say just once that the quality of care that we’re giving to people in abject poverty is as good as it would be if they were born in some ritzy part of Manhattan,” Farmer explained in an interview around 2013, the time that a new, state-of-the-art hospital opened its doors in Mirebalais, Haiti. “That vision of equity and justice and decency is what we’d like to give birth to.”

This writer had the opportunity to visit the PIH hospital— Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais— in 2015. The building itself was built in part with guidance from Boston’s own Jim Ansara of Shawmut Design and Construction, who teamed up with Partners in Health to plan the facility. Many local doctors and nurses from Boston have cycled through the hospital to accompany the many Haitian men and women who operate and treat patients at the 300-bed hospital, which opened in 2013.

But the guiding concept behind Farmer’s work has been to accompany and uplift the people of Haiti, rather than to import foreign experts to do the work that locals could do themselves. Farmer saw first-hand that Haitians were competent, capable, and eager to build up their capacity to care for their own people, but were challenged by the deep inequities of colonialism and the long legacy of slavery and domination by foreign actors, including the US.

Farmer sought to infuse funds and resources to help Haitians build up their own civil society, not to replace it.

The hospital in Mirebalais was but one example of how he and PIH sought to disrupt the status quo. His call to action was taken up by legions of medical professionals and others inspired to reject the norms of inequality of care in poor nations.

One of his thousands of devotees, Dr. Sriram Shamasunder, was with Dr. Farmer in Rwanda in his final week, assisting him in caring for poor patients in the African country. In a column published by NPR, Shamasunder said his friend and mentor was “devastated” by the death of a patient from HIV— a man whom Farmer had grown to love.

“I remember thinking that this is why he is Paul Farmer. After 40 years, losing one patient was like losing the whole world,” Shamasunder wrote.

That was Paul Farmer. He so loved the world that he made it his mission in life to care. For all of us. We’re a lesser planet for his departure.
–Bill Forry