Ashish Jha: "Paul Farmer Invented a New Way for Caring for One Another"
Ashish K. Jha—a physician and dean of Brown University's School of Public Health—wrote a tribute to Paul Farmer. The following is an excerpt from The Atlantic:
"He was unconstrained by small thinking. He rejected the artificial limitations we put on caring for the world’s poor—limits we would never put on ourselves or our families. He refused to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations.
When HIV was devastating Haiti, the standard response in public health was to write off people, saying HIV therapies were too expensive and difficult to deliver to the world’s poor. So Paul set out to prove everyone wrong. He set up clinics and hospitals with a simple goal: deliver the same quality care that he provided when he was caring for patients in Harvard’s teaching hospitals. It wasn’t an easy task, but it worked. Tens of thousands of people received the latest HIV care. So many lives were saved."