Non-Clinical Career Profile

Most of Dr. Geiger’s professional career has been devoted to the problems of health, poverty and human rights.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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, from 1965-72.
• 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.
• Received the American Public Health Association’s Sedgwick Memorial Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health.

Human Rights Work

• Founding member of one of the first chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1943.
• Civil Liberties Chairman of the American Veterans Committee from 1947-51, leading campaigns to end racial discrimination in hospital care and admission to medical schools.
• Founding member and National Program Chairman of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).
• 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.
• Consultant to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Health Organization.
• Founding member of the Emergency Committee to Save Chilean Health Workers.

Organizations and Positions

• Founding member and Past President of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
• Expert medical consultant on the United Nations Human Rights Center’s mission to former Yugoslavia (1992).
• Led PHR human rights missions to Bosnia (1993), Iraq and Kurdistan (1991), the West Bank and Gaza Strip (1990, 1988).
• Founding member and Immediate Past President of the Committee for Health in Southern Africa (CHISA).
• Served as the Mary Weston Trust Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Natal Faculty of Medicine, Durban, South Africa (1995).
• Member of the AAAS-Institute of Medicine Mission to South Africa on the Health Effects of Apartheid (1989).
• 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.
• Founding member and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility (1961).
• Co-author of the first major publications in the U.S. on the medical consequences of nuclear war (N Engl J Med, 1962).
• 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.
• Received the Award of Merit in Global Public Health, Public Health Association of New York (1982).

Publications and Contributions

• Author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles, book chapters and monographs.
• Served as a contributing editor to the American Journal of Public Health.
• Member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Health and Human Rights and the Journal of Medicine and Global Survival.

This biography and more information on the topic can be found at the Defending Dignity website.