Mountains Beyond Mountains

The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
Author: Tracy Kidder
Author's link: click here
Subject: Humanitarian, Haiti
My rating: 4.5*

About the book:
The title Mountains Beyond Mountains comes from a Haitian proverb and is a metaphor for life’s challenges. Once you have scaled one mountain, you reach a place where you can see that there are always more mountains farther away: you will never stop climbing, never be finished.
In the case of Paul Farmer, whose visionary spirit is the subject of this book, his mountain is the struggle to provide medical help to all desperately poor people. In fact, the man Tracy Kidder writes about in this nonfiction account is something of a secular saint, for Paul Farmer really only comes alive when he is tending to the illnesses of people the rest of the world has forgotten.

From the book:
"'You should compare suffering. Which suffering is worse. It's called triage.'
The term comes from the 14th century trier, 'to pick or cull', and was first used to describe the sorting of wool according to its quality. In modern medical usage, triage has two different meanings, nearly opposite. In situations where doctors and nurses and tools are limited, on battlefields, for instance, one performs triage by attending first to the severely wounded who have the best chance of survival. The aim is to save as many as possible; the others may have to die unattended. In the peacetime case, however, in well-staffed and well-stocked American emergency rooms, for example, triage isn't suppose to imply withholding care from anyone; rather, it's identifying the patients in gravest danger and giving them priority."