A handwritten paper sign directs visitors to “Jim Kim’s office” at the Harvard School of Public Health. Once there, the space is noticeably still, almost silent. Bookshelves are filled to a fraction of their capacity, with an empty conference table in the corner.
When one imagines the work space of a person actively trying to save the world, or at least, do his part, somehow, this scene at the Boston offices of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights doesn’t meet expectations. And yet, from this cavernous space, Dr. Jim Yong Kim is doing just that. This physician is engaged in the seemingly impossible fight to equalize health care access and treatment for people all over the world.
Currently the chair of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass., and the chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Kim has devoted his life to this pursuit of social justice in health care. And his work toward that end has been recognized. In 2003, Kim was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, also known as the “genius grant.” He was appointed the director of the HIV/AIDS Department of the World Health Organization in 2004. Last year, he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and is consistently cited as one of the leading contributors to global health policy.
In the world-saving circles, he is perhaps best known for his work with Paul Farmer, a similarly trained physician and anthropologist who in 1987 founded Partners in Health (PIH). Kim joined the Cambridge-based nonprofit while a Harvard Medical School student and is credited now in PIH historical literature as a co-founder of the organization, which describes its admirably ambitious mission this way: “At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well — from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family — or we ourselves — were ill.”
Armed with this vision, Kim has traveled with Farmer from Haiti to Peru, Russia to Rwanda, to treat the health problems of the poor. They have gone into neighborhoods suffering from near-epidemic cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis, and have used guerilla-like tactics to bring treatment to their patients. For some perspective on the dangers of being in this kind of environment, one need only look back at the recent case of the newlywed placed on lockdown after traveling across the United States with this form of TB, commonly known as MDR-TB.
In 1999, the World Health Organization appointed Kim and Farmer to help lead the international response to drug-resistant TB by establishing pilot treatment programs and organizing delivery systems for antibiotics.
