An Evening With Dr. Paul Farmer & Dr. Daniela Lamas

Daniela Lamas is a pulmonary and critical care doctor at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital and faculty at Harvard Medical School. Following graduation from Harvard College, she went on to earn her MD at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, where she also completed internship and residency. She then returned to Boston for her subspecialty fellowship. She has worked as a medical reporter at the Miami Herald and is frequently published in the New York Times. This is her first book. Modern medicine is a world that sparkles with cutting-edge technology and trailblazing research. Medical stories seemingly often begin with sirens and flashing lights and culminate in survival or death. But these are only the most visible narratives. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest, Daniela Lamas is fascinated by a different story: what comes after for those whose lives are extended by days, months, or years as a result of our treatments and technologies? In You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Death, and in Between (Little, Brown Spark), Lamas explores the complex answers to this question through intimate accounts of patients and their families. A grandfather whose failing heart has been replaced by a battery-operated pump; a salesman who found himself a kidney donor on social media; a college student who survived a near fatal overdose and returned home, alive but not the same – these narratives offer a detailed picture of the fragile border between sickness and health. USA

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 […]