Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder

Infections and Inequalities, a prodigiously footnoted discourse with case studies of individual patients to illustrate its main themes—the connections between poverty and disease, the maldistribution of medical technologies in the world, and “the immodest claims of causality” that scholars and health bureaucrats had offered for those phenomena. At times, it seemed that the author could hardly contain his anger.

“If disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.”

“God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.”

A doctor who knew nothing about local beliefs might end up at war with Voodoo priests, but a doctor-anthropologist who understood those beliefs could find ways to make Voodoo houngans his allies.

The first microscope in Cange was a real one, which he stole from Harvard Medical School. “Redistributive justice,” he’d later say. “We were just helping them not go to hell.”

“Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.”

“I want to talk about other bankers, not the World Bankers, but bankers in general. My suspicion is they’re not getting a lot of sex, because they spend a lot of time screwing the poor.”)

First, you perform what he calls “the distal intervention” and cure the family of TB. Then you start changing the conditions that made them especially vulnerable to TB in the first place.