H. Jack Geiger: A Pioneer Physician for Human Rights

Jack Geiger, a leader in promoting health equity, racial equality, and prevention of nuclear war, is less known for his seminal role in international human rights. We came to know Jack because he cofounded and served for decades on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, where each of us has served as executive director. It was one of many organizations he helped create that have been transformative in demonstrating the power of combining public health and science with activism to address poverty, discrimination, violence, and abuse. Jack coauthored studies of violence inflicted on health workers and people seeking care and on the all too frequent complicity of the health professions in human rights abuses in El Salvador, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. He insisted on rigorous, impartial reporting while infusing his passion for justice into every aspect of the organization’s work.

FIGURE 1—

Clipping From Chicago Sun, December 8, 1947

Jack never shied away from audacious goals and he remained forever hopeful, even in dark times. Shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, Donna McKay called Jack, trying to figure out what to tell medical students who were distraught about the threatened repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “Jack,” she asked, “what words of hope can I offer to these students?” Jack replied: “Try taking away health insurance from the more than 20 million Americans who now have it.” Underlying his quip were his savvy political strategies and clever tactics. When seeking federal funding for community health centers in the South, he had to find a way around the veto power of governors of projects funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity and the reticence of federal officials to antagonize them. He accomplished both, establishing the program to circumvent the possibility of a gubernatorial veto and in one instance staging a sit-in in the office of Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity.¹

Yet he was a realist, too. In 2002, at height of the Second Intifada, Len Rubenstein and Jack led a Physicians for Human Rights delegation to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory to investigate the violence, including Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and the Israel Defense Forces’ killing of six emergency medical responders in a two-week period.

In drafting the final statement for the delegation’s findings and recommendations, Jack pulled no punches. He insisted on calling Palestinian assaults on Israeli buses, shopping malls, and hotels homicide as opposed to suicide bombings. He wrote that “suffering and death is silently exacted” on Palestinians as a result of Israel’s imposition of curfews, arbitrary refusal of passage of patients in urgent need at checkpoints, and interruption of electricity for vital services. The statement demanded protection of the rights of Palestinians within their own state and of Israelis to live within secure borders but warned that the bombings and Israeli interference with medical care amounted to “a race to the bottom in terms of respect for human rights and international humanitarian law, with the danger that both communities will come to support violence as normal and acceptable.”² His analysis proved all too true as the Intifada continued.

In that statement, Jack also called on the international medical community to demand protection of human rights during the crisis. It mirrored Jack’s deep belief, reflected in all of his work, in the role the medical and public health communities could play in documenting human rights violations and social injustice, demanding change, and pointing the way to reform. But Jack did not idealize the health professions. He called them to account when they became apologists for or complicit in human rights violations, as when the American Medical Association defended the virulently discriminatory health system under the Apartheid regime in South Africa.³ Most of all, he stood against professional complacency, that inequity and injustice are someone else’s problem. He challenged medical educators who drained the idealism out of their students.

Somehow, though, Jack managed to combine his fiery commitment and uncompromising stance on human rights with warmth and support for us and so many others. He was always available for counsel, inspiration, and wisdom. That extended to students. In his 80s, he said that “I see my task as doing what I can to nurture the student activists and young professionals who will be the change agents of the future.”⁴ And nurture them he did. No one could better motivate students preparing to join the health professions to take their social responsibilities seriously. Jack’s speaking style was quiet, but what he said mesmerized them.

He was adept at instilling a commitment not just to serving patients and communities but to tackling the inequities that so deeply impair health. Students loved his stories of the fights he fought, often told with a twinkle in his eye, as we did. In one of them, he described his campaign in 1947 to end the University of Chicago’s discrimination against Black medical school applicants and patients at its teaching hospitals. He organized a demonstration involving more than 1000 people, but the university kept stonewalling. Jack decided to follow the money. On the eve of a scheduled meeting between university officials and a foundation that provided extensive financial support to the university, Jack met with foundation staff and, with reams of documents, asked why it would fund an institution that so blatantly discriminated. Two days after the university had its meeting, an official asked Jack “What do you want us to do?”⁴

Jack will be deeply missed by people for whom he achieved a measure of justice and by those of us he taught how to pursue it.