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Loading... Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poorby Paul Farmer
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Pathologies of Power, written before "tè tranble" (the trembling of the earth) provides both global health experts and lay readers alike with gripping first hand accounts of this remarkable doctor's work in Haiti, Africa and the United States. Farmer, an eloquent Harvard Medical School professor, describes his work providing medical care in some of the most neglected and abused populations on earth. Pathologies opens up a broad landscape to navigate regarding possibilities for global health workers and allied professionals. Those interested in alleviating the pain by those who are effected by disease, lack of nutrition, and horrific political and economic circumstances will find Farmers book a useful tool in identifying problems they will encounter in their work. I bought this book after a discussion here on LT of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and Dr. Paul Farmer, the author, who is the founder of Partners in Health as well as the subject of Mountains beyond Mountains. It is powerful, moving, and difficult-to-read: difficult to read both because of the human suffering depicted in its pages and because parts of it are quite a slog and somewhat repetitive. Dr. Farmer's basic arguments in the book are that health is a human right, but has not been treated as such by traditional human rights organizations; that poor people experience "structural violence" which makes them more likely to be sick, injured, etc., than people with more money; that poor sick people are better able to describe their needs than "experts;" that, following liberation theology, there should be a positive preference towards the poor, rather than the wealthy; and that very often treatments that are known not to work (e.g., anti-TB drugs that don't work on patients with multiple drug-resistant TB) are used for poor people (e.g., in Russian prisons) because the drugs that would work are deemed "not cost-effective." The first part of the book, in which Farmer uses his experiences in Haiti, Chiapas, Guantanamo (this book was written pre-9/11 and the US prisons for suspected terrorists there, and deals with Haitians with AIDS who were imprisoned there, contrasted with AIDS treatment in Cuba), and Russia is the most compelling because Farmer is able to draw his principles from real experiences. The second part, which is more theoretical -- Farmer is both a doctor and an anthropologist -- is harder to read and for me less interesting. This book certainly has led me to think differently about traditional foreign aid and the traditional way "donor nations" treat poorer countries. And, another outstanding aspect of the book is the many quotes from poets and other writers. no reviews | add a review
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Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.569Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Class Lower, alienated, excluded classes Poor peopleLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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