H. Jack Geiger

Herman J. Geiger (November 11, 1925 – December 28, 2020), known as H. Jack Geiger, was an American physician and civil rights activist.

He was a leader in the field of social medicine, the philosophy that doctors had a responsibility to treat the social as well as medical conditions that adversely affected patients' health, famously (and controversially) writing prescriptions for food for impoverished patients with malnutrition.

Geiger came to embody the idea of the responsibility of a physician to do something about what is now known as the social determinants of health, believing that medicine could be an instrument of social change.

He served patients' medical needs as well as social and economic necessities, which he believed were in large part responsible for the health problems communities faced.

Herman J. Geiger, called Jack, was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, on November 11, 1925.

His parents, a doctor (Jacob) and a microbiologist (Virginia Lowenstein), were both Jewish immigrants, from Austria and Germany respectively.

They raised "Jackie" and his sister on Manhattan's Upper West Side, with relatives fleeing the Nazis often staying in the Geiger home on arrival to the United States.

Geiger rapidly skipped grades in public school and, as a result, graduated from Townsend Harris High School at 14.

Not yet old enough to enroll in college, he landed a job as a copy boy at The New York Times.

A jazz fan, he often went out at night to Harlem's jazz clubs (to his parents' displeasure).

He ran away from home at age 14 (in 1940) to the Sugar Hill, Harlem home of Canada Lee, as Geiger later recounted on This American Life.

He had met the African American actor backstage at a Broadway production of Native Son.

Lee agreed to take Geiger in and Geiger stayed for over a year (with the consent of Geiger's parents).

Lee took on the role of surrogate father.

During his time with Lee, Geiger was introduced to people like Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, Richard Wright, Adam Clayton Powell, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, and William Saroyan.

Geiger heard African American visitors to Lee's home recount their experiences of racism; the treatment of African American troops in the US South at this time particularly made an impression on Geiger.

With the help of a loan from Lee, Geiger enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1941.

At night he worked at The Madison Capitol Times newspaper, though still under 18, Geiger had to acquire a special exemption from Madison's curfew for minors.

In 1942, Geiger joined A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin who were planning a march on Washington in protest of racial discrimination in the defense factories for World War II; they succeeded in pressuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt to take measures against this without going through with the march.

In 1943, Geiger met James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which prompted Geiger to start a CORE chapter in Madison, one of the earliest chapters.

As a part of CORE, Geiger took part in a variety of efforts to push the civil rights agenda.

Among them,  he took a large part in efforts to integrate housing and restaurants.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress, Geiger recounts how he, along with his interracial team of CORE members, would go into restaurants and get asked to leave because they refused to serve black individuals.

They would then proceed to begin a sit-in and go around the restaurant explaining the situation and inviting other customers to join in their effort.

In 1943, Geiger turned 18 and left school to join the war effort, enlisting with the merchant marine because it was the only racially integrated military service at the time.

He worked on the only ship in World War II with an African American captain, Hugh Mulzac, on the SS Booker T. Washington.

He was discharged in 1947 and enrolled at the University of Chicago to pursue pre-med studies, but where he also encountered significant anti-Black discrimination.

He organized a strike, with two thousand faculty and students protesting issues like the exclusion of African American patients from certain hospitals and the rejection of qualified African American applicants to the medical school.

As a part of the campus chapter of the American Veteran Association (AVC), Geiger discovered that the University of Chicago Hospital had been denying black patients.

Specifically, the maternity hospital had a strict policy that no black mother could have their baby delivered there.

Instead, he recognized that many university hospitals, including the University of Chicago at the time, had been finding ways to exclude black patients and redirect them towards a black-run hospital, Provident Hospital, located in the South Side of Chicago.

Geiger also discovered the discrimination in the Medical School Admissions Committee, finding that the records for the minutes of admissions meetings specifically talked about black applicants being qualified but not accepting them because they were "not ready to have a black student at this time".

After many unsuccessful attempts to bring attention to the issues, Geiger and the AVC planned a protest that took place on December 7, 1947.

For his "extracurricular" activities, he was blackballed by the American Medical Association and returned to working in journalism, unable to gain entrance to medical school.

Working as a science journalist, he was active in efforts to use science in the service of human needs.

After five years in journalism, Geiger secured an assignment that allowed him to approach medical school deans.

Jack Caughey of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine was encouraging and Geiger successfully enrolled in 1954.

While in medical school, a Rockefeller grant allowed him to spend five months working in Pholela, South Africa, at a health clinic that also invested in other local improvements—latrines, vegetable gardens, feeding programs—and succeeded thanks significantly to local staff members engagement with the community this way.

He was one of the doctors to bring the community health center model to the United States, starting a network that serves 28 million low-income patients as of 2020.

The Arthur C. Logan Professor of Community Medicine at the City University of New York School of Medicine, Geiger was a cofounder and president of Physicians for Human Rights as well as a cofounder and president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, each of which won Nobel Peace Prizes.