R.I.P. H. Jack Geiger

Doctor Who Fought Social Ills Dies at 95

‘Dr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.

…Dr. Geiger was a leading proponent of “social medicine,” the idea that doctors should use their expertise and moral authority not just to treat illness but also to change the conditions that made people sick in the first place: poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education….’

— Via New York Times

Jack Geiger was one of my heroes in the practice of medicine. He was a cofounder of two groups doing important work in medicine — and for the world — in which I have been active, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which leveraged our medical stature in the fight against nuclear weapons, and Physicians for Human Rights. His genius was in defining many of the aspect’s of inhumanity and aggression as public health problems to mobilize health care professionals as social change agents, “redefining what it meant to be a physician.”