Infections and inequalities1999

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. What is it like to be a doctor to the poor, observing with an anthropologist's eye the harsh juxtapositions of excess and misery? Moving regularly from the teaching hospitals of Harvard, themselves abutting urban poverty, to a clinic in the hills of Haiti's Central Plateau, Farmer has experienced firsthand the peculiarly modern inequality that seems inseparable from AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging)...