Mountains Beyond Mountains

by

Tracy Kidder

Doctor Paul Farmer Character Analysis

The protagonist of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Paul Farmer is a brilliant doctor and anthropologist. Moreover, he’s a devoted humanitarian, to the point where he can’t imagine a life for himself that doesn’t involve taking care of the sick and injured in Third-World countries like Haiti and Peru. Farmer has always been interested in helping the downtrodden, and his most profound struggles have always concerned how best to help them. Unlike many of his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, Farmer is a proponent of liberation theology, an interpretation of Catholicism that supports active engagement in one’s community. At the same time, Farmer doesn’t believe in God: he embraces Catholicism and yet questions it deeply. Farmer’s conflicted relationship with science and religion makes him a natural fit for practicing medicine in Haiti, where he makes an effort to understand Haitians’ relationship with Voodoo. During the course of the book, Farmer also grapples with the ethics of cost-efficiency: for every patient he chooses to help, he’s effectively denying his treatment to hundreds of others. Ultimately, Farmer stands as a fascinating, complex figure: fiercely committed to Catholicism, yet agnostic; devoted to other people, yet almost a stranger to his wife and child.

Doctor Paul Farmer Quotes in Mountains Beyond Mountains

The Mountains Beyond Mountains quotes below are all either spoken by Doctor Paul Farmer or refer to Doctor Paul Farmer. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cost-Efficiency vs. the Value of Life Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, “That guy’s a fuckin’ saint.”

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Joe (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

He made about $125,000 a year from Harvard and the Brigham, but he never saw his paychecks or the honoraria or royalties, both fairly small sums, that he received for his lectures and writings. The bookkeeper at PIH headquarters cashed the checks, paid his bills—and his mother’s mortgage—and put whatever was left in the treasury. One day in 1999, Farmer tried to use his credit card and was told he’d reached his limit.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

And then of course it dawned on him that he knew plenty of Americans—he was one himself—who held apparently contradictory beliefs, such as faith in both medicine and prayer. He felt, he said, as though he hung in the air before his patient, “suspended by her sympathy and bemusement.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

By then Farmer had quit his fraternity. He wrote them that he couldn’t belong to an all-white organization. (“I received quite a frosty reply,” he would say, in a tone of voice that implied this still surprised him.) He’d come to admire his father’s distaste for putting on airs.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

But independence had been followed by nearly two hundred years of misrule, aided and abetted by foreign powers, especially France and the United States. (From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines had occupied and run the country.) To Farmer, Haiti’s history seemed, indeed, like The Lord of the Rings, an ongoing story of a great and terrible struggle between the rich and the poor, between good and evil.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

For a long time I thought I could live and work in Haiti, carving out a life with you, but now I understand that I can’t. And that’s simply not compatible with your life—the life you once told me you would like to lead even ten years ago.

Related Characters: Ophelia Dahl (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

He was already attracted to liberation theology. “A powerful rebuke to the hiding away of poverty,” he called it. “A rebuke that transcends scholarly analysis.” In Haiti, the essence of the doctrine came alive for him. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more. And our cause is just.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

On the way back they laughed about the incident, and yet of all the times she’d eaten things that she could hardly bear to look at, this one occasion when she failed the test stood out for her.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Some people said that medicine addresses only the symptoms of poverty. This, they agreed, was true, and they’d make “common cause” with anyone sincerely trying to change the “political economies” of countries like Haiti. But it didn’t follow, as some self-styled radicals said, that good works without revolution only prolonged the status quo, that the only thing projects like Cange really accomplish is the creation of “dependency.”

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim
Page Number: 100
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

He’d write about how the Centers for Disease Control, a federal U.S. agency, had gone so far as to identify Haitians as a “risk group,” along with several other groups whose names began with h—homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users—and about the incalculable harm all this had done to Haiti’s fragile economy and to Haitians wherever they lived. In his thesis, he’d marshal a host of epidemiological data to show that AIDS had almost certainly come from North America to Haiti.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

In early 1994, just before The Uses of Haiti came out, Farmer wrote an editorial for The Miami Herald. The gist of it was: “Should the U.S. military intervene in Haiti? We already have. Now we should do so in a new way, to restore democracy.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 117
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

The motion of his mind toward root causes had always excited him. He loved the challenge of diagnosis and all its accoutrements—the stains on the microscopic slides, the beautiful morphologies of the creatures under the lens. But what he called “the eureka moment” had a bad aftertaste this time. Later he would tell me, “God, I’d hate to ever feel triumphant about something so rotten.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

Farmer and Kim began collecting a number of official WHO statements. Some put the case more plainly: “In developing countries, people with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis usually die, because effective treatment is often impossible in poor countries.” For Farmer […] there was a larger principle involved. A TB epidemic, laced with MDR, had visited New York City in the late 1980s; it had been centered in prisons, homeless shelters, and public hospitals. When all the costs were totaled, various American agencies had spent about a billion dollars stanching the outbreak. Meanwhile, here in Peru, where the government made debt payments of more than a billion dollars every year to American banks and international lending institutions, experts in international TB control had deemed MDR too expensive to treat.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Then Goldfarb spoke up again, his voice calm and acidic. “I want to share with you a simple reality. I have six million dollars. With three million dollars I can eemplement DOTS for five thousand Russian prison inmates. And assuming that ten percent have MDR-TB, forty-five hundred will be cured and five hundred will go down with MDR-TB and die. And there’s nothing much you can do. So. I have a choice. And my choice is to use another three million dollars to treat the five hundred with MDR-TB, or go to another region and treat another five thousand. I’m working with leemited resources. So my choice is not involved in the human rights of five hundred people, but five hundred people versus five thousand people.

Related Characters: Alex Goldfarb (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

As sometimes happened, Paul seemed to know what Jim was thinking. “What do you want to do now?” he asked. There was warmth in the question, Jim felt, a real invitation for him to come clean. “Political work is interesting to me, and it has to be done,” he said. “I prefer it to taking care of patients. It’s O for the P on an international scale.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Jim Yong Kim (speaker)
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

Farmer was forty now, and he had the credentials to operate in the way Hiatt envisioned, on a purely executive level. In academic circles his reputation had grown. He was about to become a tenured Harvard professor. He was near the head of the line for the big prizes in medical anthropology; some of his peers were now saying that he’d “redefined” the field.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Howard Hiatt
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

He distrusted all ideologies, including his own, at least a little. “It’s an ology, after all,” he had written to me about liberation theology. “And all ologies fail us at some point. At a point, I suspect, not very far from where the Haitian poor live out their dangerous lives.” Where might it fail? He told me, “If one pushes this ology to its logical conclusion, then God is to be found in the struggle against injustice.

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:

It still seemed to me that he took a stance all too conveniently impregnable. He embodied a preferential option for the poor. Therefore, any criticism of him amounted to an assault on the already downtrodden people he served. But I knew by now he wasn’t simply posing. I felt something about him that I’d later frame to myself this way: He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity. Every sick person seemed to be a potential patient of Farmer’s and every healthy person a potential student. In his mind, he was fighting all poverty all the time, an endeavor full of difficulties and inevitable failures.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

If you say, Well, I just think how much could have been done with twenty thousand dollars, you sound thoughtful, sensible, you know, reasonable, rational, someone you really want on your side. However, if you were to point out, But a young attending physician makes one hundred thousand dollars, not twenty, and that’s five times what it cost to try to save a boy’s life—that just makes you sound like an asshole. Same world, same numbers, same figures, same currency.

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker)
Related Symbols: John’s Treatment
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Mountains LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mountains Beyond Mountains PDF

Doctor Paul Farmer Quotes in Mountains Beyond Mountains

The Mountains Beyond Mountains quotes below are all either spoken by Doctor Paul Farmer or refer to Doctor Paul Farmer. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cost-Efficiency vs. the Value of Life Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, “That guy’s a fuckin’ saint.”

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Joe (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

He made about $125,000 a year from Harvard and the Brigham, but he never saw his paychecks or the honoraria or royalties, both fairly small sums, that he received for his lectures and writings. The bookkeeper at PIH headquarters cashed the checks, paid his bills—and his mother’s mortgage—and put whatever was left in the treasury. One day in 1999, Farmer tried to use his credit card and was told he’d reached his limit.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

And then of course it dawned on him that he knew plenty of Americans—he was one himself—who held apparently contradictory beliefs, such as faith in both medicine and prayer. He felt, he said, as though he hung in the air before his patient, “suspended by her sympathy and bemusement.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

By then Farmer had quit his fraternity. He wrote them that he couldn’t belong to an all-white organization. (“I received quite a frosty reply,” he would say, in a tone of voice that implied this still surprised him.) He’d come to admire his father’s distaste for putting on airs.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

But independence had been followed by nearly two hundred years of misrule, aided and abetted by foreign powers, especially France and the United States. (From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines had occupied and run the country.) To Farmer, Haiti’s history seemed, indeed, like The Lord of the Rings, an ongoing story of a great and terrible struggle between the rich and the poor, between good and evil.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

For a long time I thought I could live and work in Haiti, carving out a life with you, but now I understand that I can’t. And that’s simply not compatible with your life—the life you once told me you would like to lead even ten years ago.

Related Characters: Ophelia Dahl (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

He was already attracted to liberation theology. “A powerful rebuke to the hiding away of poverty,” he called it. “A rebuke that transcends scholarly analysis.” In Haiti, the essence of the doctrine came alive for him. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more. And our cause is just.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

On the way back they laughed about the incident, and yet of all the times she’d eaten things that she could hardly bear to look at, this one occasion when she failed the test stood out for her.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Some people said that medicine addresses only the symptoms of poverty. This, they agreed, was true, and they’d make “common cause” with anyone sincerely trying to change the “political economies” of countries like Haiti. But it didn’t follow, as some self-styled radicals said, that good works without revolution only prolonged the status quo, that the only thing projects like Cange really accomplish is the creation of “dependency.”

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim
Page Number: 100
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

He’d write about how the Centers for Disease Control, a federal U.S. agency, had gone so far as to identify Haitians as a “risk group,” along with several other groups whose names began with h—homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users—and about the incalculable harm all this had done to Haiti’s fragile economy and to Haitians wherever they lived. In his thesis, he’d marshal a host of epidemiological data to show that AIDS had almost certainly come from North America to Haiti.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

In early 1994, just before The Uses of Haiti came out, Farmer wrote an editorial for The Miami Herald. The gist of it was: “Should the U.S. military intervene in Haiti? We already have. Now we should do so in a new way, to restore democracy.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 117
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

The motion of his mind toward root causes had always excited him. He loved the challenge of diagnosis and all its accoutrements—the stains on the microscopic slides, the beautiful morphologies of the creatures under the lens. But what he called “the eureka moment” had a bad aftertaste this time. Later he would tell me, “God, I’d hate to ever feel triumphant about something so rotten.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

Farmer and Kim began collecting a number of official WHO statements. Some put the case more plainly: “In developing countries, people with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis usually die, because effective treatment is often impossible in poor countries.” For Farmer […] there was a larger principle involved. A TB epidemic, laced with MDR, had visited New York City in the late 1980s; it had been centered in prisons, homeless shelters, and public hospitals. When all the costs were totaled, various American agencies had spent about a billion dollars stanching the outbreak. Meanwhile, here in Peru, where the government made debt payments of more than a billion dollars every year to American banks and international lending institutions, experts in international TB control had deemed MDR too expensive to treat.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Then Goldfarb spoke up again, his voice calm and acidic. “I want to share with you a simple reality. I have six million dollars. With three million dollars I can eemplement DOTS for five thousand Russian prison inmates. And assuming that ten percent have MDR-TB, forty-five hundred will be cured and five hundred will go down with MDR-TB and die. And there’s nothing much you can do. So. I have a choice. And my choice is to use another three million dollars to treat the five hundred with MDR-TB, or go to another region and treat another five thousand. I’m working with leemited resources. So my choice is not involved in the human rights of five hundred people, but five hundred people versus five thousand people.

Related Characters: Alex Goldfarb (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

As sometimes happened, Paul seemed to know what Jim was thinking. “What do you want to do now?” he asked. There was warmth in the question, Jim felt, a real invitation for him to come clean. “Political work is interesting to me, and it has to be done,” he said. “I prefer it to taking care of patients. It’s O for the P on an international scale.”

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Jim Yong Kim (speaker)
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

Farmer was forty now, and he had the credentials to operate in the way Hiatt envisioned, on a purely executive level. In academic circles his reputation had grown. He was about to become a tenured Harvard professor. He was near the head of the line for the big prizes in medical anthropology; some of his peers were now saying that he’d “redefined” the field.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer, Howard Hiatt
Page Number: 182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

He distrusted all ideologies, including his own, at least a little. “It’s an ology, after all,” he had written to me about liberation theology. “And all ologies fail us at some point. At a point, I suspect, not very far from where the Haitian poor live out their dangerous lives.” Where might it fail? He told me, “If one pushes this ology to its logical conclusion, then God is to be found in the struggle against injustice.

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker), Tracy Kidder (speaker)
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:

It still seemed to me that he took a stance all too conveniently impregnable. He embodied a preferential option for the poor. Therefore, any criticism of him amounted to an assault on the already downtrodden people he served. But I knew by now he wasn’t simply posing. I felt something about him that I’d later frame to myself this way: He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity. Every sick person seemed to be a potential patient of Farmer’s and every healthy person a potential student. In his mind, he was fighting all poverty all the time, an endeavor full of difficulties and inevitable failures.

Related Characters: Tracy Kidder (speaker), Doctor Paul Farmer
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

If you say, Well, I just think how much could have been done with twenty thousand dollars, you sound thoughtful, sensible, you know, reasonable, rational, someone you really want on your side. However, if you were to point out, But a young attending physician makes one hundred thousand dollars, not twenty, and that’s five times what it cost to try to save a boy’s life—that just makes you sound like an asshole. Same world, same numbers, same figures, same currency.

Related Characters: Doctor Paul Farmer (speaker)
Related Symbols: John’s Treatment
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis: