Yes, the disease - just like coronaviruses - is spread in part through caregiving. The truth, as Farmer makes crystal clear, often with an incandescent anger that shines through even his measured words, is much different. Read Full Review >Īnthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, based at Harvard Medical School, turns of Ebola on its head in his eye-opening, densely detailed, and riveting Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. … It was the contingent history of a population made vulnerable.' For that terrain - and the ravages of history that created it - Farmer has given us an invaluable map. 'This was not,' Farmer writes, 'a history of inevitable mortality that resulted from ancient evolutionary forces.
But Farmer invokes it to point to a broader landscape, more political than biological: the violent conflict and material inequalities that inevitably play a role in determining whether a virus destroys a human life, or leaves it relatively unscathed. If indeed Pasteur said the line, the reference to “the terrain” was an allusion to the 'terrain' of the human body, and to the immune system in particular. Farmer begins the final section of Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds with a quote apparently uttered by Louis Pasteur on his deathbed: 'Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout.' The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything. The chronology loops back on itself multiple times.
Instead of a disease thriller or a straight memoir, Farmer’s book is structured almost like an experimental novel, or a time-twisting prestige television drama.
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