Something to Think On

"He's still going to make those 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 that some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world. I think he undertakes what, earlier today, he called 'journeys to the sick' in part because he has to, in order to keep going. 'That's when I feel most alive,' he told me once on an airplane, 'when I'm helping people.' He makes these house calls regularly and usually without blan witnesses, at times when no one from Harvard or WHO can see him kneeling on mud floors with his stethoscope plugged in. This matters to him, I think- to feel, at least occasionally, that he doctors in obscurity, so that he knows he doctors first because he believes it's the right thing to do.

If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility. His patients tend to get better. They all get comforted. And he carries off, among other things, images of them and their medieval huts. These refresh his passion and authority, so that he can travel a quarter of a million miles a year and scheme and write about the health of populations. Doctoring is the ultimate source of his power, I think. His basic message is simple: This person is sick, and I am a doctor. Everyone, potentially, can understand and sympathize, since everyone knows or imagines sickness personally. And it can't be hard for most people to imagine what it would be like to have no doctor, no hope of medicine. 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."

(Tracy Kidder, in Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Dr. Paul Farmer