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

by Tracy Kidder

It still seemed to me that he took a stance all too conveniently impregnable. He embodied a preferential option for the poor. Therefore, any criticism of him amounted to an assault on the already downtrodden people he served. But I knew by now he wasn’t simply posing. I felt something about him that I’d later frame to myself this way: He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity. Every sick person seemed to be a potential patient of Farmer’s and every healthy person a potential student. In his mind, he was fighting all poverty all the time, an endeavor full of difficulties and inevitable failures. For him, the reward was inward clarity, and the price perpetual anger or, at best, discomfort with the world, not always on the surface but always there. Sensing this, I’d begun to be relieved of the shallower discomforts I sometimes felt in his company, that I’d felt keenly back in the airport in Cuba. Farmer wasn’t put on earth to make anyone feel comfortable, except for those lucky enough to be his patients,