Dr. Paul Farmer, the physician, anthropologist, and humanitarian whose life had been defined by his commitment to providing excellent healthcare to the world’s poorest people and who had devoted decades to Haiti in particular, died on February 21, 2022 in Butaro, Rwanda, of cardiac arrest at the age of 62. His death was mourned around the world and represented an enormous loss for Haiti, for global health equity, and for the broader movement to treat healthcare as a human right rather than a privilege.
Farmer had co-founded Partners in Health in Haiti in the late 1980s with Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, and others, building from a small clinic in Cange in the Central Plateau into a global health organization operating in some of the world’s most challenging settings. His work in Haiti, described in Tracy Kidder’s influential book “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” had introduced millions of readers to the reality of healthcare inequality and to the argument that structural violence — the systematic harm done to people by poverty and inequality — was itself a form of violence that demanded a medical and political response.
In Haiti, the news of Farmer’s death was received with deep grief by the communities he had served, the healthcare workers he had trained, and the civil society leaders with whom he had collaborated over decades. Tributes poured in from across Haitian society, from the Central Plateau communities where he had begun his work to the Port-au-Prince institutions he had helped build.
Farmer had continued to engage deeply with Haiti through all the crises of recent years — the 2010 earthquake, the cholera epidemic, the political crisis, the 2021 earthquake. His advocacy had consistently connected the immediate suffering of Haitians to the structural and historical factors that produced that suffering, insisting that real solutions required addressing causes not just symptoms. Haiti had lost its most eloquent and persistent international advocate.