Dr. Paul Farmer and speech Pulitzer-prize winning author Tracy Kidder spoke Wednesday night in Page Auditorium, discussing Mountains Beyond Mountains, this year's summer reading selection, which chronicles Farmer's life.
The world-renowned infectious disease specialist has an infectious wit. Freewheeling humor infused nearly every breath of Dr. Paul Farmer’s speech Wednesday night in Page Auditorium, as he and Pulitzer-prize winning author Tracy Kidder discussed Mountains Beyond Mountains, this year’s summer reading selection, which chronicles Farmer’s life.
Farmer made very clear from the beginning that educating freshmen was the focus of his talk. In between repeated goading of his student audience with insinuations that they had not actually completed the book, Farmer buckled down to the task: describing his experiences at Duke and encouraging students to appreciate their own.
“Don’t be as blind as I was,” he said. “Make sure and take a measure of our own privilege and be sure to use it wisely.”
Farmer, Trinity ’82, went on to describe Duke’s influence in his life. He traced back to his undergraduate years all of the interests that now define his work, from a fascination with medical anthropology to the Clinique Bon Saveur, a small hospital he founded in Cange, Haiti.
“I feel a great debt to this place,” he said of Duke. Farmer said he came to the University with the conviction to become a doctor. In 1980, his junior year, the 20-year old Farmer began to feel the need for “broadening.” He subsequently enrolled in a medical anthropology class that landed him a job in the emergency room of Duke University Hospital, where a profusely bleeding stab wound his first night on the job landed him “flat on the floor.”
Farmer, now a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School, has traveled from the labs of Duke’s to the prisons of Russia and the mountain villages of Haiti as a much-celebrated authority on global health issues. It was there in rural Haiti, just three years after his graduation from Duke, that Farmer founded the Clinique Bon Saveur and Zanmi Lasante, Creole for Partners in Health, a state-of-the-art health clinic featured significantly in Kidder’s book. Farmer did not make Haiti the focus of this speech, however, alluding only vaguely to slow relief efforts in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Jeanne and the long history the United States shares with Haiti. “Unfortunately it’s a very tragic and brutal history,” he said. “It’s a history not of distance, but of closeness.”
Farmer spoke more extensively about the state of American health care, pointing out that the United States spends more of its gross national product on health care than any other nation and yet still lags far behind universal equity. “ We can deliver some of the best tertiary care,” he said. Primary care access, however, is still greatly unequal, he said. He attributed the lack of a universal health care system to an absence of collective “political will” among voters.
Farmer often employed biographer Tracy Kidder as a foil for his humor. Kidder spoke very little during the discussion, playing a quiet background to Farmer. Echoing Farmer’s advice, Kidder cautioned students, “Pay attention. You don’t want to join the collective amnesia that I feel like a lot of Americans share to the suffering around us.”
He also warned students, however, not to “try to reproduce a life like Paul Farmer’s.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “The point is to take heart from the example that he and his colleagues like him prove—that individual people can improve the world.”
While both men often intentionally directed their speech to students, Page Auditorium was packed with a wide spectrum of Duke community members. Chris Ellis, the residence coordinator on-call, managed to find a few minutes between pages to listen. “I thought [Farmer] was very down to earth, very engaging with students in his conversation,” he said.
Although senior Kimberly Noel also found Farmer engaging, she expressed a little regret at the general nature of the speech. “When you read all the books, you want to get so much more than a lecture like this can give you,” she said.
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