Paul Farmer - Reimagining Global Health

PRAISE FOR REIMAGINING GLOBAL HEALTH

It is a challenging task to provide a novel and comprehensive view of global healtha dynamic arena for action and an increasingly attractive academic field. Reimagining Global Health does this with scholarly rigor and political courage. This book will become essential reading for all those working in clinical, public health, and policy roles to address the daunting health disparities of our times.

JULIO FRENK , Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, Former Minister of Health of Mexico (20002006)

The past decade has seen an unprecedented explosion of interest in the health and welfare of marginalized communities around the world. Reimagining Global Health offers a critical approach to the contemporary global health landscape while also tracing its historical antecedents and suggesting a way forward. This seminal work by leading figures in the field is a crucial next step for those interested in grappling with the modern reality of global health inequity. Without question, Reimagining Global Health is a salient volume that will shape global health research, practice, and knowledge for many years to come.

AMBASSADOR MARK DYBUL, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS

Inspired by practicing physicians like two of the authors of this bookPaul Farmer and Jim Kim, who wont take no for an answer when it comes to the universal right to healthmany undergraduates, medical students, and professionals have turned to global health as their specialty and their calling. Before now, this nascent field did not have a unifying conceptual approach, let alone a text. This book, based on the authors decades of practice and years of successfully teaching global health at Harvard, masterfully fills this gap. It presents a strong vision of health as a biological and social phenomenon, and it illustrates how academics from different disciplines, as well as practitioners, must work together to understand not only what works but also how it can be sustainably delivered. Avoiding both cynicism and blind optimism, this book, like the authors in their work, is hopeful, practical, and demanding. It will become an unavoidable reference in the field.

ESTHER DUFLO , Department of Economics, MIT, and author of Poor Economics

With its unwavering commitment to social justice and refreshingly lucid sense of possibility, Reimagining Global Health is an essential antidote to the deadly and inexcusable health disparities of our times. Combining deep social analysis and visceral human and institutional engagements, the authors of this momentous book resocialize and politicize disease and health and, in the process, create a distinct and innovative grammar that will surely inspire and shape the work of generations of global health scholars and practitioners.

JOO BIEHL , Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

From the interstices of medical knowledge and practices and the social sciences a new academic field of global health is emerging. While economists worship their methodology and political scientists their great thinkers, global health specialists have outflanked them all in the quest for real explanations and real solutions to the most pressing problems of the worlds poor people. With this book, written by some of the fields pioneers, you can take the first step in orienting yourself in this fluid and interdisciplinary endeavor. Iconoclastic and passionate in equal measure.

JAMES ROBINSON , David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University

Lucky Harvard students having these teachers! And lucky students elsewhere when they have the chance to read this important book. I was familiar in one way or another with most of the material covered by this book, and I could not put it down.

MICHAEL MARMOT , University College, London, Institute of Health Equity

When I first invited Paul Farmer and Jim Kim to Rwanda ten years ago, it was not for business as usual. The partnership they committed to was working to break the cycle of poverty and disease in some of Rwandas poorest districts. Together, through the leadership of the Rwandan public sector and the steadfast accompaniment of global visionaries including many coauthors of chapters in this book, we are redefining what is possible in health care delivery. Reimagining Global Health asks how the hard-won lessons learned along the way might be shared most widely and usefully. In these pages, students and practitioners across disciplines and contexts will find crucial questions for all those who would advance the human right to health. Rich case studies and incisive biosocial analysis throw the central importance of humility, constancy, and imagination into bold relief.

DR. AGNES BINAGWAHO , Minister of Health of Rwanda; Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School; Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

This inspiring book transforms the field of global health into a revolutionary global movement for human rights to combat the needless suffering imposed by North/South social inequality. The authors historical, practice-based, and theoretical arguments wrench the field out of its colonial-missionary roots and attack the contemporary greedy behemoths of Bio-Tech, Big Pharma, for-profit healthcare, and cost-benefit neoliberal triage logics to make Health for All a real possibility, as well as a universal human right to be enforced by political will, funding, and democratic access to technology.

PHILIPPE BOURGOIS , author of Righteous Dopefiend and of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Reimagining Global Health is a well-written text based on extensive research, teaching, and practical experience. The fact that it is based on three years of teaching a course implies that it has been finely honed by responses from students. It is superbly researched and written and provides many new angles and fresh perspectives.

SOLLY BENATAR , Professor, Dalla School of Public Health and Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Chairmans Circle of the University of California Press Foundation, whose members are:

Stephen A. and Melva Arditti

Elizabeth and David Birka-White

Ajay Shah and Lata Krishnan

James and Carlin Naify

William and Sheila Nolan

Barbara Z. Otto

Loren and Frances Rothschild

Patricia and David Schwartz

Sidney Stern Memorial Trust

Howard Welinsky and Karren Ganstwig

Lynne Withey

Reimagining Global Health

CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologists role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropologys commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debatetransforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings.

Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University)

Contributing Editors: Philippe Bourgois (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Farmer (Partners In Health), Alex Hinton (Rutgers University), Carolyn Nordstrom (University of Notre Dame), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (UC Berkeley)

University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider

Reimagining Global Health

An Introduction

Paul Farmer

Jim Yong Kim

Arthur Kleinman

Matthew Basilico

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS