236. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Tracy Kidder
Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography, Medicine, Public Policy
333 pages, published August 31, 2004
Reading Format: e-Book on Overdrive
Summary
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard educated doctor whose life’s mission is a quest to improve the health of the world’s impoverished people, with is the destitute plateau region of Haiti as his primary place of work. Farmer has also worked in Peru, Cuba, and Russia. In addition to humanitarian work, Farmer is a Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, modern day Robin Hood. Farmer and his compatriots focus on diagnosing and curing infectious diseases and bringing the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.
Quotes
“And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn’t care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He’s still going to make these hikes, he’d insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”
“That’s when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I’m helping people.”
“WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.”
“Paul’s face grew serious. ‘I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich […] I’m very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I’m American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that’s called privilege, not democracy.”
“The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don’t want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.”
“I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls “ambivalence,” the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.”
“One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people cannot care, erase, not remember.”
“It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.” “Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.” “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. … You know, people from our background-like you, like most PIH-ers, like me-we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
My Take
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a powerful book written by the very talented Tracy Kidder (a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a different book) about the difference that one person can make with their life. The title comes from the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too. That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of Dr. Paul Farmer and it was very inspiring to see how it has played out in his life.
