"Every time we would just try to dream small, he would always amplify, turning any small dream into a gigantic action," he said.
Much of Kidder's book features Farmer's work in Haiti, where he transformed medical care in the rural area around the village of Cange.
"He saved many lives in Haiti," said Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, a former Haitian prime minister, who knew Farmer from his earliest days as a doctor. He was known in Haiti as "le docteur des pauvres," the doctor of the poor.
"He never stopped fighting against poverty and also the stigmatization of poverty on Haiti," Pierre-Louis said. "Lots of people who have been trained by him in Haiti and other countries will continue his work."
He wrote a dozen books of his own on different aspects of global health. His most recent, "Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History ," focused on the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015, the patients he met while fighting it and the mistakes he believed were made by his own organization and others who tried to help.
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, described Farmer as "the world's most powerful advocate for health and justice."
"He believed everyone has the right to the same cutting edge treatments as are available in the United States and other rich countries," said Gostin, who knew Farmer since the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
A University Professor and chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, many of the people he taught and mentored became leaders in the field of global public health.
Later in his career, Farmer became more interested in public policy and was working to transform the system of international aid from its focus on charity and dependence to empowerment and building local capacity, USC's Cohen said.
"The legacy they leave behind is more doctors, more nurses, stronger institutions, a greater sense of pride in a health system that has been very much neglected if not rattled by the international aid system through the years," Cohen said. "You can measure the impact in terms of lives saved, but also a more sustainable health system."
His impact stretched beyond patient care.
Michael Murphy was an architecture student at Harvard when he heard Farmer speak and decided to volunteer with Partners In Health. A few years later, Murphy formed a firm, called Model of Architecture Serving Society (MASS) Design Group to build that hospital in Butaro.
It was based on Farmer's philosophy that the poor deserved more than the most basic facilities, that "dignity is something we can't afford not to have and push for," Murphy said.
The firm, which has gone on to build other Partners In Health buildings, was named the 2022 Architecture Firm of the Year by the American Society of Architects and is now considered a model for the field.
Although Farmer wrote like a scholar, he talked like a regular guy, keeping up with the Red Sox, the reading recommendations of friends and remembering details about the children of acquaintances.
He was also hilarious and accepted people for who they were, his former colleague Jennifer Goldsmith said. "He didn't judge other people," Goldsmith said. "He was just unfailingly kind and unfailingly funny."
During the pandemic, he and Partners In Health turned their attention to fighting COVID-19, performing contact tracing for a handful of states across the country and speaking out against inequities in vaccination and care.
A non-stop traveler before the pandemic, he spent most of the last two years working out of his home in Miami, Goldsmith said, tending to his beloved garden.
Farmer's friends often accused him of being “pathologically optimistic,” enabling him to see promise in seemingly hopeless situations.
In a 2020 interview with USA TODAY , he had a different take: "The thing about idealism, is if you can always link it to pragmatism, you’re going to be OK."
Farmer is survived by his wife, Didi Bertrand Farmer, and their three children, Catherine, Elizabeth and Sebastian; his mother Ginny; his sisters, Katy, Jennifer and Peggy and his brothers, Jim and Jeffrey.
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
