The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.

There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives

In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.