Paul E. Farmer, a prominent doctor and medical anthropologist who will address this year’s graduating class at Harvard Medical School (HMS), often appears to be in more than one place at a time.

One day, the affable doctor will be teaching a class at HMS—where he is a professor of medical anthropology—or in attendance at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). The next, he is treating patients and running a large clinic in the poor rural town of Cange, Haiti. In between, he may check on the medical programs he helped found in Peru, Siberia, Mexico and Guatemala.

And colleagues say that Farmer is also a formidable doctor when dealing directly with patients.

Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project, says he has seen Farmer “perform literally a medical miracle.”

“He was extraordinarily instrumental in saving the lives of patients that were, according to the conventional wisdom, unsavable,” he says.

The Red Pill

On paper, Farmer is an infectious disease physician and a medical anthropologist—a man who strives to understand the social and cultural causes of illness as well as directly treating them. But out in the field, he is much more than an accomplished academic and a talented doctor.

Farmer says in an e-mail that his Class Day speech will center on “what it means for a young physician to take the red pill,” a reference to the popular movie The Matrix and its hit sequel. In the movie, taking a red pill means abandoning a reassuring fantasy world and throwing oneself into the gritty, disheartening realities of an ongoing war for justice.

And if anyone can be said to have taken the red pill in his professional life—to have unflinchingly faced the darkest face of human mortality in an immediate, hands-on confrontation—it is Farmer.

An average day at his Clinique Bon Saveur in Haiti involves treating desperately sick adults and children, “most of them TB or HIV patients with a bit of malaria thrown in,” he says. In the brief moments between patients, Farmer will confer with political leaders about grave issues of public health.

Outside the clinic, Farmer’s chosen locale looks grim. Horrifying pandemics decimate a population scarred by the poverty and terror that an ongoing U.S. embargo, years of a violent junta and marauding paramilitary forces have bred.

Early this May, an ambulance carrying five of Farmer’s colleagues in Cange was hijacked at gunpoint by uniformed men, apparently former members of the Duvalier dictatorship’s dismantled army. The men, it later became clear, had killed two security guards at a major power plant and shut down electricity for the island nation’s central region.

In his years in Haiti, constantly exposed to ill patients, Farmer casually mentions that he’s had malaria “a couple of times. Well, maybe more than a couple.” He’s also managed to contract “the usual diseases that goofy anthropologists or incautious students get,” though he has somehow avoided acquiring the drug-resistant tuberculosis he often treats.

To most, this life would be a chaotic nightmare. Haiti is the sort of place a starry-eyed student might visit, working there for a few months before beating a swift retreat back to a comfortable suburban practice in the States.

Instead, Farmer has spent the last 20 years staring down the world’s most urgent medical problems.