Paul Farmer Lecture

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October 2 , 2007
For immediate release

Dr. Paul Farmer will present the free public lecture titled Global Health Equity – The Partners in Health Experience from Haiti to Rwanda on Monday, October 22 at 8 pm at the Arlington Theatre; not Campbell Hall as was previously announced. This event is presented by the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and UCSB Arts & Lectures. Dr. Farmer is a founding director of Partners in Health (PIH), an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and research focusing on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. The New England Journal of Medicine writes, “There are many kinds of gifted physicians: clinicians, researchers, and those who build institutions. Paul Farmer is the rarest of all: a prophet.”

Farmer – who has been awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius award” in recognition of his work – will discuss how social forces contribute to disease burden and shape access to timely diagnoses and effective treatment through an examination of AIDS programs in impoverished nations like rural Haiti and Rwanda. His visit is presented in cooperation with the Santa Barbara Public Library’s “Santa Barbara Reads” program this fall featuring Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Mountains Beyond Mountains – The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2004).

A world-renowned authority on tuberculosis treatment and control, Farmer is an attending physician in infectious diseases and Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and Medical Director of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in rural Haiti. Along with his colleagues at the Brigham, at Harvard, and with PIH, Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for diseases such as HIV/AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in some of the world’s most resource-poor areas. He has written extensively about health and human rights and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcomes of treatable diseases.

Farmer is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Pathologies of Power – Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003), Infections and Inequalities (1998), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation (1992).

Courtesy of Borders, books by Paul Farmer will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

This lecture is generously supported by Diane and Albert Kaneb and Patricia and Brian Kelly.

[For photos, download hi res images at the Arts & Lectures website]
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