Dr. Paul Farmer to Lecture at Penn

Posted by on February 26, 2007

Dr. Paul Farmer
Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, Harvard
Medical School and Co-Founder, Partners in Health

AIDS in 2007: Building a Health Care Movement
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
4:30 PM
Irvine Auditorium
34th and Spruce Streets
The Dean’s Forum is free and open to the public.

About the Dean’s Forum
Initiated in 1984 to celebrate the richness of the arts and sciences, the Dean’s Forum offers the University community and the general public the opportunity to meet with leading intellectual figures who exemplify the liberal arts tradition. The Dean’s Forum also recognizes outstanding undergraduate and graduate students for their academic performance and intellectual promise.

About Dr. Paul Farmer
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to caring for some of the world’s poorest and sickest populations. He is the subject of writer Tracy Kidder’s character study, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and he trains medical students at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he is chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities. Farmer divides much of his time between the Harvard medical complex and Clinique Bon Saveur, the hospital he founded in rural Haiti while still a medical student. In 1987, he co-founded Partners in Health, which provides medical services to impoverished communities in Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, Russia and elsewhere. He has written extensively about health, human rights and the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. His many awards include a MacArthur “genius” Award, the AMA’s International Physician Award, the Heinz Award for the Human Condition and Union Theological Seminary’s Union Medal, which recognizes people “making an important difference.” In his book about Farmer, Tracy Kidder writes, “His basic message is simple: This person is sick, and I am a doctor.”