Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
Written by Paul Farmer and Amartya Sen
Narrated by Jack Chekijian
4/5
()
About this audiobook
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.
Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer is co-founder of Partners In Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has authored numerous books, including Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and The New War on the Poor. Jim Yong Kim is co-founder of Partners In Health and the current President of the World Bank Group. Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of numerous influential works including The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition. Matthew Basilico is a medical student at Harvard Medical School and a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, where he has lived and worked with his wife Marguerite.
More audiobooks from Paul Farmer
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Haiti After the Earthquake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Pathologies of Power
Related audiobooks
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUntil We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Powerarchy: Understanding the Psychology of Oppression for Social Transformation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sex and World Peace Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Social Determinants of Health: Third Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Political Determinants of Health Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition, with an Update a Decade Later Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Us Less Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWell: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Separated: Inside an American Tragedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Diabetes: A History of Race & Disease Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social Science For You
The Hunger Games Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lonely Dad Conversations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kindred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Left Hand of Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hate U Give Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Year of Magical Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Pathologies of Power
87 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good topic but I thought the book could be more succinct.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pathologies of Power, written before "tè tranble" (the trembling of the earth) provides both global health experts and lay readers alike 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I've been meaning to read some Farmer for years now and finally got around to it. Gave me a whole new perspective on how the world works, and a new way to think about global inequality.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paul Farmer, perhaps the most famous 'Third World doctor' living today, has written an eloquent and moving plea for a reconsideration of modern approaches toward healthcare in the developing nations in this book, "Pathologies of Power". Based on his personal experiences of care in Haiti, but also his professional visits to Russia, Africa, Central America, Mexico, Cuba and many other places besides, Paul Farmer demonstrates that the problematics of healthcare and those of poverty and inequality are insolubly linked in these nations. Whoever says "heal the sick" must also say "end poverty", for the one is not possible without the other; and whoever says "prevent disease" must also say "destroy socio-economic inequality", for the one is not possible without the other. That is the message of this book. A large part of the work consists of reflections by Farmer on his experiences in Haiti and elsewhere and on the way in which the current worldwide economic structures engender a genuine and systematic violence against the rights of the poor. Strongly inspired by liberation theology (though not necessarily religious), Farmer eloquently and effectively contrasts the heavy importance attached to individual political and legal rights with the way in which the violations of rights done by structural inequalities and injustices is wholly ignored in the same circles that would complain about the former. Rights issues are the domain of jurists, development issues the domain of (liberal) economists; but the way in which the poor and weak are constantly crushed by the systematic repression that is poverty and inequality, at least as real and at least as much a violation as any torture, that seems to be the domain of nobody at all. As Paul Farmer clearly shows, even in the lately so blossoming domain of medical and bioethics the issue of socio-economic structures is completely swept under the carpet. As he says, this really is the "elephant in the room". The same also goes for the oft-invoked importance of efficiency. Callous and counterproductive Western, often American, inspired healthcare policies in the developing nations (among which we must now sadly share Russia as well) generally fail at providing effective treatment against simple preventable disease such as TBC, because those medications that would actually help are considered "not cost-effective". This is in fact just a polite way of saying "we don't care about these people", but then phrased in a manner that will lead to less of an uproar in the newspapers. Farmer however is not fooled so easily, and sees this for what it is - a structural repression of the developing nations by the developed ones, in the name of "efficiency", i.e. efficiency in achieving the aims of the Western states. This book is a very powerful work, and a strong indictment of the prevailing attitude towards healthcare and development issues and the little attention paid to their interrelation. It also demonstrates convincingly how the current worldwide economic system is bad for everybody's health. And what could be a more important thing than that?