Per Fugelli lecture 2016: Paul Farmer

“Structural interventions to address structural violence: Global health equity in Haiti and Rwanda”. Open guest lecture by Paul Farmer. The seminar is an annual event in honour of professor Per Fugelli.

Postlude: Social Medicine in the age of Global Health - A conversation between Per Fugelli and Paul Farmer.

Book covers by Paul Farmer

Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health and human rights, about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases, and about global health.

Program

Guest lecture by Paul Farmer
15.00 Introduction Espen Bjertness and Ole Petter Ottersen
15.10

 "Structural interventions to address structural violence: Global health equity in Haiti and Rwanda"

Paul Farmer

15.50 Invited discussants

Ruth Prince and Trygve Ottersen

16:15 Comments and questions Chair: John-Arne Røttingen
16:45 Structural Violence and Death Per Fugelli
17:00 Break  
Postlude: Social Medicine in the age of Global Health - A conversation between Per Fugelli and Paul Farmer
17:15

Activist or academic? Researcher or missionary? Politician or white-coated healer?

A conversation between Paul Farmer and Per Fugelli.

"In each new generation of doctors, ..... this branch of medicine attracts not only analytical minds, but also people who feel a strong vocation to improve health in society by attacking plain injustice. They are impatient with the distant attitude of science." Jan P. Vandenbroucke.

About Paul Farmer

PortrettPaul Edward Farmer is an American anthropologist and physician who is best known for his humanitarian work providing suitable health care to rural and under-resourced areas in developing countries, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of an international social justice and health organization, Partners In Health (PIH), he is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

Farmer is currently the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University, formerly the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

In August 2009, Farmer was named United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti (serving under former US President Bill Clinton, in his capacity as Special Envoy), to assist in improving the economic and social conditions of the Caribbean nation.

About Per Fugelli

PortrettAs a general practitioner, Per Fugelli has been an independent critic of his own profession for many years. He has opposed the bureaucratisation of Norwegian health care institutions. Fugelli takes a humanistic approach to health and social policy, focussing on the entire individual. He has shown that the best "social medicine" is to build up and share dignity with vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities, the poor and those who are physically challenged.

Through countless lectures and fearless participation in a large number of important debates, he has been a prominent contributor to Norway's public space fora for a long time. He was awarded The Freedom of Expression Prize 2013.

 

Event Committee

  • Espen Bjertness
  • John-Arne Røttingen
  • Anne Kveim Lie

Previous lectures

  • 2015: Sir Andrew Haines: "Planetary health -   human health and global environmental change"
  • 2014: Richard Horton and Anthony Costello
    • Horton: "The Seeress's Prophecy: a 21st century retelling"
    • Costello: "The fundamental concept in social science is power" (Bertrand Russell). How can this idea help us build a global social medicine to tackle sustainable development challenges?

The patient earth

The topic of this seminar is based on an article from 1993: In search of a global social medicine (pdf). After publishing the article, Fugelli and a group of students established a forum called "The patient earth". The forum inspired students and researchers at the Faculty of Medicine to focus on global health.

Published Nov. 18, 2016 1:26 PM - Last modified Nov. 24, 2021 12:42 PM