March 2, 2009, Jim Yong Kim was appointed to be 17th president of Dartmouth College. He would be the first Asian American to assume the Ivy League president. When I watched his introduction ceremony clip at Dartmouth college homepage, I was impressed by his academic achievements and long lists of experience in the field of global health as an activist. I was not alone. Dartmouth students, faculty, community members, alumni, and the board of trustees were hugely inspired by his effort and passion as a global health leader for the prevention and cure for infectious diseases for the poor. That was the main reason that he was elected among 400 potential candidates. 
      
        I also found out in that clip that Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains was the vector that eventually led Dartmouth students and faculty to be charmed by Dr. Kim’s long battle against the infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. So I bought the book. 
     
       The book was mainly about Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners In Health, which was the non-profit public health organization originally founded by Dr. Paul, Kim, Ophelia Dahl, who is a daughter of Roald Dahl, famous British children’s book author of Charlie and the chocolate factory, and Tom White, Boston philanthropist. The title ’ The Quest of Dr.Paul’ would sum up his long story quite well, because Paul travelled a lot to save the poorest of the poorest in the world from the rural shanty town in Haiti and the tuberculosis stricken slums in Peru, to the remote Siberia.  No matter where his patients were would he climb mountains beyond mountains day and night. 
        
       As a child, Paul immensly liked to read the Lord of the Rings Triology, the story of  the downtrodden small Hobbits struggling to defeat the overwhelming evil. Just like the Hobbits’ tale, Dr. Paul began his own journey to destroy the powerful evil ring, in his case, the infectious diseases and socio-economic injustice. As a student of anthropology and medicine, he realized that the main causes of the pandemic of infectious diseases in developing countries were the abject poverty and negligence by the political and economical elite class. Partners In Health was founded for just the same purpose as the Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of Tolkin’s Triology, to eradicate the evil from the world. Thus I would like to call PIH the Fellowship of medicine and health. Dr. Paul would be Frodo Baggins, Dr. Kim Samwise, Ophelia Meriadoc, Tom Gandalf the grey magician.

         The second volume, the Two Towers are the evil towers of Orthanc and Cirith Ungol. The two evil towers Dr. Paul strived to destroy are tuberculosis/multidrug-resistant TB and HIV/AIDS. He and PIH tried hard to lower the prices of expensive TB and antiretroviral drugs for the poor. However, their quest is not over yet. Millions of the patients are still in agony and more of them will be harassed by the diseases. Nevertheless, our Frodo, Dr. Paul would not or could not stop his journey. He would keep going and climbing up mountains beyond mountains, fighting to the finish.