Mountains Beyond Mountains
Dr. Paul Farmer, who helped establish the Partners In Health organization, is the subject of Tracy Kidder’s latest biography. Partners in Health began in Boston but quickly spread into Haiti, Peru, and Russia, in an effort to wipe out or control tuberculosis and aids. Paul Farmer is not only a devoted doctor, but a Harvard professor, an infectious-disease specialist, and an anthropologist, who claims he can’t sleep, because "...there’s always somebody not getting treatment."
Paul grew up in an old bus his father had made into a home. The family also had a second home on a small boat they sailed in the Gulf of Mexico. But after graduating from high school, Paul left home and his family to attend Yale and later the Harvard Medical School.
The people of Haiti became his interest while he was studying medicine, and especially the peasants in the town of Cango. Too many people were stricken with tuberculosis and the normal drugs were not always effective. The Haitian people often blamed it on sorcery. But Farmer noted that "Haitians believe in sorcery because their culture has evolved in the absence of effective medicine." One didn’t have to go too far past Port-au-Prince on the coast of Haiti to see that most people lived in poverty, which in turn seemed to breed tuberculosis and aids.
The Partners In Health organization accepted Haiti’s challenge and raised funds to build a hospital in Cango called Zammi Lasante, where treatments were always free. Tom White, who was a benevolent Boston business man and several other charitable foundations contributed towards the hospital. And working closely with Paul were Dr. Jim Kim, who said he and Paul were "twin sons of different mothers" and Ophelia, a young English woman whom Paul wanted to marry. But she held back and he later married Didi, a Haitian woman, although she and their daughter are seldom mentioned in the book.
But Partners In Health also found tuberculosis spreading through Peru and most prisons in Russia. Paul Farmer, who had taught a Harvard course in "Varieties of Human Suffering" could not avoid these medical challenges, and each year he averaged a quarter million flying miles between Boston, Haiti, Peru, and Russia.
Tracy Kidder joined Paul on many of these trips, and they also took day-long hikes to treat ailing people in the mountains of Haiti. Although he sometimes becomes the principal character in the biography, the author still gives a first-hand account of Paul Farmer’s life, a life dedicated to the people who had little but religion to live by.
Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains was published in 2003.