Paul Farmer

Paul Farmer is a professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University as well as chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a founding director of Partners In Health. In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. Paul Farmer experienced the Ebola outbreak firsthand—Partners in Health, the organization he founded, was among the international responders. In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) he offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. Why did it happen, and what can we learn from it?  Farmer tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient. Rebutting misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly, he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice. Under formal colonial rule, disease containment was a priority but care was not – and the region’s health care woes worsened, with devastating consequences that Farmer traces up to the present. Publishers Weekly called it “An incisive and deeply informed account of the Ebola outbreak […]. Placing the epidemic within the historical context of the transatlantic slave trade, European colonial rule, and more recent “diamond-fueled” civil wars […]