Pathologies of power
Subtitle: health, human rights, and the new war on the poor
By: Paul Farmer ; with a foreword by Amartya Sen
Series: California series in public anthropology -- 4
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
Subjects: Poor; Human rights; Equality; Right to health; Medical care; Social stratification; Discrimination in medical care
Description: "Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working 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.

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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 333-378) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Bearing witness; On suffering and structural violence; Pestilence and restraint; Lessons from Chiapas; A plague on all our houses?; title: One physician's perspective on human rights; Health, healing, and social justice; Listening for prophetic voices; Cruel and unusual; New malaise; Rethinking health and human rights; title: Afterword.