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The Doctor and his Boswell:
Farmer, left, and biographer Kidder
Photo:Chris Hildreth |
During fall semester, Duke Magazine and the Office of Student Affairs
sponsored the fourth Duke Magazine Campus Forum, featuring a
public conversation with Paul Farmer and Tracy Kidder. Farmer
'82 is a physician, infectious-disease specialist, and the subject
of Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains, which was the summer
reading assignment for the Class of 2008.
Farmer has won Duke's Humanitarian Award, a MacArthur Foundation "genius
award," and the Heinz Foundation Award. The nonprofit organization
he co-founded, Partners In Health, which operates in Haiti, Peru,
Russia, Cuba, and Mexico, has changed international health practices,
proving the efficacy of delivering modern medicine in resource-poor
settings and advocating for access to decent health care as a basic
right of the world's poorest and most marginalized people.
Kidder has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and
the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Besides Mountains Beyond Mountains,
he is the author of The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren,
Old Friends, and Home Town.
The following is an edited version of their conversation, which
took place in a packed Page Auditorium on September 29, 2004. The
event was the culmination of a four-day campus visit, during which
Farmer met with first-year medical students and took part in discussions
on global health with campus leaders, including Duke Medical Center's
new chancellor, Victor Dzau. Kidder sat in on a journalism class
and gave a reading in the Rare Book Room in Perkins Library.
On Partners In Health
kidder: In the time I spent on the road with Paul, I was introduced
to more reasons for despair than I'd ever imagined. The problems
in places like Haiti and urban slums of Latin America and prisons
in Siberia are truly horrifying. But, traveling with him was
not just the most exhausting experience of my life, it was also
the most exhilarating and the most hopeful.
I had become accustomed to skipping over stories about the AIDS
pandemic, for instance, in the newspaper. It seemed too big, too
complicated, too expensive a problem ever to be solved. And here
was this guy and this group of people, Partners In Health, saying, "No,
it's not too big. It's not too expensive. It's not too complicated.
And here's the proof." A skeptical person like me looks into
the statistics. And this was a group that hadn't lost a single
patient to an uncomplicated case of tuberculosis in--I think it
was twelve years at that time.
The other side of that, of course, is that the message was daunting.
Because if, in fact, we have all the tools and the money to take
on AIDS and TB throughout the world--at the moment [Partners In
Health] is treating AIDS patients in Haiti, one of the most difficult
settings you can imagine, for, I believe, around $20 a year per
AIDS patient--then it can be done everywhere. And so, we're left
with a choice--a choice about the kind of world we want to live
in, it seems to me. And I, frankly, don't want to live in a world
in which we let mass extinctions occur.
On "his" book
farmer: I can't tell you how many people have said to me, "Oh,
I just love your book." And I think, "Oh, you mean Uses
of Haiti?" I know they never mean that. They always mean his
book, which is kind of annoying. [Laughter]
Okay, I won't be bitter, because, fortunately, I have some skills
that he does not. And some of them I acquired right here--a lot
of them.
Since many of you are probably freshmen, I know that you were forced
to read this book. Which, actually, I also know is a farce. I know
most of you didn't read it. Because even though you were [told]
to, you just didn't. That's called the resistance--the weapons
of the weak.
So, I don't imagine that you've all read this book written by Tracy.
And I know that you've not read my [six] books, because I see the
sales figures. But, my mother has read my books, and she is of
the opinion that my books are as good as or better than Tracy's
book.
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