Pathologies of Power (eBook)

Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

Paul Farmer (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2004
438 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
9780520931473 (ISBN)

Infos

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of illness, of lifeand deathin extreme situationsto interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. A thoughtful memoir with passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. 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 mirrored in pathology, plague, disease and death. Yet this doctor's autobiography is far from a hopeless inventory of human suffering. 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. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to pathologists, medical students, and humanitarians in a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

Inhalt

Foreword by Amartya Sen
Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART I. BEARING WITNESS
1. On Suffering and Structural Violence
Social and Economic Rights in the Global Era
2. Pestilence and Restraint
Guantánamo, AIDS, and the Logic of Quarantine
3. Lessons from Chiapas
4. A Plague on All Our Houses?
Resurgent Tuberculosis inside Russia’s Prisons

PART II. ONE PHYSICIAN’S PERSPECTIVE ON HUMAN RIGHTS
5. Health, Healing, and Social Justice
Insights from Liberation Theology
6. Listening for Prophetic Voices
A Critique of Market-Based Medicine
7. Cruel and Unusual
Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis as Punishment
8. New Malaise
Medical Ethics and Social Rights in the Global Era
9. Rethinking Health and Human Rights
Time for a Paradigm Shift

Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.11.2004
• Reihe/Serie: California Series in Public Anthropology
• Reihe/Serie: California Series in Public Anthropology
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Gesundheitswesen
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: activism • biography memoir • Disease • disturbing examples • doctor autobiography • Epidemic • Haiti • health and wellness • HIV • Human Rights • Human Rights Violations • human suffering • Inequality • integrity research board • IRB • medical advancement • Medical Anthropology • medical student • Medical technology • optimistic view • pathologist • Pathology • Peru • Plague • political and economic injustice • Russia • Sociology • stories of illness • studying diseases • study of disease • Tuberculosis • urgent plea • Violence
• ISBN-13: 9780520931473 / 9780520931473