Paul Edward Farmer died on February 21, 2022, in Butaro, Rwanda (Figure 1). From a childhood living with his family of eight in a converted school bus, he became a prominent public anthropologist, global health physician, and leading medical humanitarian and health justice advocate. Farmer helped build hospitals, medical schools, and community care networks for the poor in numerous countries. He cofounded the organization Partners In Health (PIH) which modeled new approaches in global health policy and healthcare, cultivating partnerships between wealthy and poor institutions and demonstrating that diseases like TB, HIV, and Ebola can and must be treated among all people, including the poor. He advanced understandings of structural violence, illuminating the mechanisms through which social forces like poverty and racism cause harm, and he joined others to demand meaningful change from those in power.Farmer was born October 26, 1959, in North Adams, Massachusetts, the second of six children. His father, "Paul Senior," was a "free spirit" who rejected class hierarchies and taught his children to stand up for the underdog. Paul Sr. worked as a high school math teacher, coach, salesman, and traveling film projectionist. Paul's mother, Ginny, raised the children before completing her degree at Smith College and becoming a librarian. Their father gave his children drive, discipline, and principled defiance of authority; their mother gave them compassion, kindness, and warmth. When Paul Jr. (his siblings called him "PJ") was young, the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, then to Brooksville, Florida, where they lived in campgrounds in repurposed buses and later in a houseboat anchored in Jenkins Creek. The family bathed in the creek and brought drinking water from town.One summer when it was especially difficult for the family to make ends meet, Paul and his siblings worked several days harvesting oranges in the orchards nearby, later remembering how difficult the work was (Farmer, 2009). His siblings remember PJ as especially academically inclined. He was the founding President of the Herpetology Club in junior high and at age 11 used a pointer and his own drawings to teach his family about reptiles.Farmer attended Duke University on a full scholarship, majoring in biochemistry until his third year when he was "hooked" by a medical anthropology course (Farmer, 1985) and changed to anthropology. In the class, he read Shirley Lindenbaum's (1979) analysis of the frightening infectious disease kuru (the first recorded prion disease among humans) through the lenses of history, colonialism, and sorcery as well as biomedicine. He read Arthur Kleinman's (1981) Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture and began a multiyear correspondence with Kleinman about his growing interests in psychological and medical anthropology. One of Farmer's mentors at Duke, Atwood Gaines, hired Farmer onto an ethnographic project in Alsace, France, where he went door-to-door asking ordinary people about the meaning of injustice and suffering...
