Legacy
During the response to the 2021 earthquake, Paul meets with doctors he helped train at HUM in Haiti.
Paul called his students and colleagues his “retirement plan.”
After starting Partners In Health in Cange, Haiti, with co-founders Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, Todd McCormack and Tom White, the organization has grown to more than 20,000 employees — the vast majority of whom are local members of the communities they serve. Among the many global initiatives Paul spearheaded were demonstrating successful treatment of HIV and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis patients in places of poverty, thus changing WHO treatment protocols; helping to inspire President Bush to create PEPFAR, and other hugely successful global AIDS and TB relief collaborations.
Paul’s final title at PIH was Chief Strategist, and the organization uses his “Five S’s” philosophy to build strong health systems and create tangible change in peoples’ lives in eleven countries. The organization continues to respond to the moral imperative to provide high-quality health care globally to those who need it most. PIHers strive to ease suffering by placing patients at the center of their care, meeting their physical, mental, emotional and daily needs so that they can recover from illness and maintain good health. Their stated goal is to bring the benefits of modern medicine to those who have suffered from the overt and subtle injustices of the world, in the past and in the present.
Through his work at Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Paul trained generations of students not only as clinicians or anthropologists, but as activists and world citizens. As a University Professor, Paul held Harvard’s highest teaching rank, and his classes such as “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Cares?” were highly in demand. He wrote more than 100 academic papers in addition to his influential books, and he was invited to speak at dozens of colleges around the world, inspiring many to join fields of global humanitarianism.
Paul’s passion for leadership and teaching extended even to creating as a PIH initiative a new college in rural Rwanda, the University of Global Health Equity. As its Chancellor, he created the curriculum and connected UGHE to Harvard Medical School, aiming to provide expert knowledge for students from across Africa and the world to care for their own communities. And a collaborative named after Paul will guide $50 million dollars to support students there for decades to come.
Paul Farmer teaches UGHE students while on rounds at Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, weeks before his death.
“To pull a million people out of poverty in the last several years, to build stable institutions where none existed — to me, that is about hope and it's about rejecting despair and cynicism.”
— Paul Farmer
(Left) In the 1980s, Paul Farmer weighs baby Bobby, son of a Cange woman whom Farmer helped recover from cerebral malaria during her pregnancy. (Below) That baby is now Dr. Ferle Jean Sauvener, a PIH doctor at Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais in Haiti.
Partner organizations have sprung forth from Paul’s example, and he helped shape them in many ways, including serving on their boards: Build Health International, Last Mile Health, Seed Global Health, Clinton Health Access Initiative, St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, Equal Justice Initiative, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, Village Health Works, and many more.
Thanks to Paul, new hospitals have been built in clinical deserts, providing care where none existed. Some of the poorest societies around the world have begun to recover from the effects of systemic injustice, pandemics and genocide. His unique vision — simple, replicable, proven — continues today.
Paul Farmer’s greatest legacy, of course, is the better well-being of millions of people around the world, and the positive effects they in turn have on their own communities.