To better your understanding of non-clinical career options and/or facilitate your physician career change, today we introduce you to H. Jack Geiger, MD, M.Sci. Dr. Geiger is Former President and Founding Member, Physicians for Human Rights, the Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine at City University of New York Medical School, and Visiting Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University School of Public Health. He received his MD from Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1958 and trained in internal medicine on the Harvard Service of Boston City Hospital from 1958-64. During this period he also obtained his MPH in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Most of Dr. Geiger’s professional career has been devoted to the problems of health, poverty and human rights.
He initiated the community health center model in the US, combining community-oriented primary care, public health interventions, and civil rights and community empowerment and development initiatives. He was also a leader in the development of the national health center network of more than 900 urban, rural and migrant centers, which are currently serving around 14fourteen million low-income patients. From 1965-72 he was Co-Director and then Director of the first urban and first rural health centers in the U.S., at Columbia Point, Boston, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi. In 1998 he received the Institute of Medicine’s Gustav O. Lienhard Award for creating a model of the contemporary community health center to serve the poor and disadvantaged and for contributions to the advancement of minority health. In 1998 he was also awarded the American Public Health Association’s Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health.
Dr. Geiger’s work in human rights spans more than five decades. He was a founding member of one of the first chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1943 and was Civil Liberties Chairman of the American Veterans Committee from l947-51, leading campaigns to end racial discrimination in hospital care and admission to medical schools. In the 1960s he was a founding member and National Program Chairman of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) and Field Coordinator of its Mississippi program to protect and provide medical care for civil rights workers; Chairman of the Health Committee of the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, and consultant to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Health Organization. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the Emergency Committee to Save Chilean Health Workers.
Dr. Geiger is a founding member (1986) and Past President of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). He served as expert medical consultant on the United Nations Human Rights Center’s mission to former Yugoslavia (1992) and led PHR human rights missions to Bosnia (1993), Iraq and Kurdistan (1991), the West Bank and Gaza Strip (1990, 1988). Dr. Geiger has helped to plan more than 35 PHR missions to Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Chile, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Israel, Kashmir, Kenya, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Panama, Somalia, South Korea, Thailand, Tibet and the former Soviet Union.
Dr. Geiger is a founding member and immediate Past President of the Committee for Health in Southern Africa (CHISA) and was a member of the AAAS-Institute of Medicine Mission to South Africa on the Health Effects of Apartheid (1989). Dr. Geiger also served as the Mary Weston Trust Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Natal Faculty of Medicine, Durban, South Africa (1995). In 1997 he was a member of the AAAS-PHR-CHISA consultative mission to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine human rights violations in the health sector under apartheid, and was one of the authors of the mission’s report, Human Rights and Health: The Legacy of Apartheid.
Dr. Geiger is a founding member member and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility (1961) and a co-author of the first major publications in the U.S. on the medical consequences of nuclear war (N Engl J Med, 1962). He led a PSR delegation to the Soviet Union to explore the health consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. From 1988-92 he chaired the PSR/Physicians’ Task Force on the Health Hazards of Nuclear Weapons Production and co-directed a critical review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s epidemiological studies of the nuclear weapons plant workforce, published in 1992 as a monograph, Dead Reckoning. In 1982 he received the Award of Merit in Global Public Health, Public Health Association of New York.
Dr. Geiger is the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles, book chapters and monographs. He has served as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Public Health; a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Health and Human Rights and the Journal of Medicine and Global Survival.
He also has served on the National Advisory Council, National Health Service Corps; the National Advisory Committee on Energy-Related Epidemiological Research of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Boards of Directors of National Medical Fellowships, Physicians for Human Rights, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and CHISA.
This biography and more information on the topic can be found at the Defending Dignity website.
