Summary Of Dr. Paul Farmer's Pathologies Of Power

Dr. Paul Farmer shares with us his experiences with the violation of human rights in his latest book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New war on the Poor. This book was centered around a well noted critique of the liberal views on human rights, which has rarely served interest. The first half of this book is called Bearing witness. He used this title to describe the first half of the book because it was based solely of on personal experiences. He stated, “They are partial accounts, but they are eye witness accounts.” I plan to analyze this book on the basis of its positive and negative issues that Farmer brought to attention in the book, how this work has added to the depiction of a group community as a whole and if these
This half of the book dealt with the poor and how the deep poverty issues lead to social issues like racisim. This part of the book highlighted the lives of individuals and how their situations related and how if they were poor or hungry then they would continue to live in poverty or worsen and the power and wealthy would continue grow. I found this part of the book interesting because I was able to visualize what he was trying to convey, which gave me a better understanding of his
He also revealed his own roots which came from Christian Latin Americans theologist Gustavo Gutierrez. At time the second part of the book lacked structure causing an audience to become tiring because of some of the similarities of “structural violence.” Farmers ultimate goal with his work was to bring to attention the realities of the poorer of majority of our world. He used this reality as a call for new medical ethic.
Chapter 5 distinguishes the difference among three approaches, in comparing charity, development, and social justice. Of those three approaches to health care and other rights, only social justice is adequate. Charity can sometimes be helpful and necessary, it theorizes that that people in better positions are inferior, rather than to structural inequalities. Development mat lift society in aggregate, but it may not lift the poorest of the poor. Inequalities are more significant because of such an advancement in scientific studies. Healthcare today is now life and death situations, whereas before this kind of technology didn’t really