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Paul Farmer

Physician and medical anthropologist; co-founder of Partners In Health

United States · 1959–2022

American infectious-disease physician and anthropologist who co-founded Partners In Health in 1987 and built community-based treatment programmes for tuberculosis and HIV in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda and Russia. He chaired the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

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Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
And some of the things that we saw in the ’80s, really, they were failures, because patients died. But they allowed us to diagnose the systems’ problems and say, “This is where we need a community health worker system. This is where we need to make sure patients have food support while they’re getting these medicines,” et cetera. So those are examples of tragedies that certainly lead to — not just personal epiphanies — but collective epiphanies, where you say, “You know what? We can do this better if we have the system fixed.”

Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗

Question What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
I think a lot of people, when they’re really young, and in their 20s, they are on their own quest for personal efficacy. And I understand that. ... But the sooner that people can discover that it’s really about building teams, and not about personal efficacy, I think the better — the more quickly — we can move forward. I believe that.

Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 3 July 2009 source ↗

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