Farmer, Paul — Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (19) Source Information

Farmer, Paul — Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (19) Source Information Author: Paul Farmer Full Title: Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley / Los Angeles / London) Year: 19 Type: Secondary Source — medical anthropology, public health, structural violence Location in Vault: research/secondary-sources/ Status Text extracted: Yes (PDF) Review pass: Audited and integrated (2026-04-13) Chapter notes: farmer infections and inequalities ch notes Overview Infections and Inequalities is Farmer's second major book-length argument about the political economy of disease, extending and deepening the framework he developed in AIDS and Accusation (1992). Where that earlier book focused tightly on Haiti and the geography of AIDS blame, this book broadens the scope to AIDS and tuberculosis across multiple settings — rural Haiti, Peru, inner-city United States — while sharpening the theoretical claim: social inequalities do not merely correlate with disease, they constitute it. Inequality itself is, in Farmer's phrase, "a pathogenic force." The book opens with a personal account of Farmer's trajectory as physician-anthropologist, rooted in his arrival in Haiti's Central Plateau in 1983, his partnership with a Haitian priest to found the Clinique Bon Sauveur in Do Kay (1985), and his co-founding of Zanmi Lasante and Partners in Health with Jim Yong Kim.