Paul Farmer is a doctor of medicine. He has worked all over the world with the dispossessed, the sick, the dying and most of all with the poor. Farmer is among the few medical professionals who as well as giving his time to those who are less fortunate than us has set about to attack the institution that keep these "pathologies of power" in place. What Farmer gives us with this book is anecdotes of patients of his from all over the world as well as statistics that put the public health system in these countries to shame, and put the rest of us to shame as well for allowing this to go on.
Throughout this book, Farmer exposes the very institutions that benefit most from a health system that fails literally millions of people. He expresses frustration where an easily solvable problem in medical terms is unable to be solved because the appropriate drugs simply aren't available. Diseases such as tuberculosis, which are curable in the vast majority of cases with relatively inexpensive drugs. It is largely because these drugs are not available that medical professionals have seen a huge increase in the amount of cases of multi-drug-resistant TB. These are especially telling in prison populations, where often a prison sentence can also become a life sentence.
Furthermore, Farmer expands on this to confront why medical ethics courses largely stick to the plight of those with the fortune to be able to access the right drugs or even to be able to sign their rights away. He sees public health as essentially lacking even among organisation such as the World Health Organisation. More than anything this book stands as a call to action for those of us who find it easier to turn a blind eye. It is both personal with a large amount of anecdotes and statistically sound in its reproduction of the plight of people all over the world.
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