YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL News Release

CONTACT:    Gustav Spohn, Director of Communications and Publications, Yale Divinity School, 203-432-3466, gus.spohn@yale.edu

Dr. Paul Farmer, international health activist, to deliver address at Yale Divinity School on poverty, health care, and acts of mercy

Dr. Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard Medical School and a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), will deliver a lecture at Yale Divinity School on April 26 entitled "The Corporal Works of Mercy and the 21st-century Struggle Against Poverty." His talk will address concepts of holistic health, liberation theology, and his work on infectious disease as a vehicle for social change. The lecture, free and open to the public, begins at 6:00 pm in Marquand Chapel, followed by a reception at 7:00 pm in the Common Room.  Yale Divinity School is located at 409 Prospect St., New Haven.

Farmer, an anthropologist and physician and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, is well-known for his work with Partners In Health (PIH)—an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. His work focuses on community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases in resource-poor settings, health and human rights, and the role of social inequalities in determining disease distribution and outcomes.

He is also chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and served for 10 years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti. He and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings.  In addition, Farmer is the UN Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti, under Special Envoy Bill Clinton.

Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. His most recent book is Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader. Other titles include Pathologies of Power, Infections and Inequalities, The Uses of Haiti, and AIDS and Accusations.  He is the recipient of numerous health and humanitarian awards, and in 1993 he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award in recognition of his work. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Co-sponsoring the event are Yale Divinity School, through the Office of the Dean and the Samuel Thorne and Zenas Crane lectureships, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale, and the Yale Medical Humanities Lecture Series.