The Weight of the Listening Heart

In 1987, Dr. Paul Farmer was a twenty-seven-year-old medical student who walked into a squatter settlement outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and realized that every diagnosis he had memorized at Harvard meant nothing without understanding the lives in front of him. A woman brought her feverish child, and Farmer could have prescribed the textbook treatment. Instead, he sat on a cinder block and listened.…