Geiger chosen to present School’s commencement address
| March 19, 2010 | |
Dr. H. Jack Geiger
The man credited with founding the nation’s first rural community health center – and inspiring a generation of public health leaders – will address the 2010 graduates of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Human rights activist, physician and epidemiologist H. Jack Geiger will present this year’s commencement address on Saturday, May 8, at 1 p.m. in Memorial Hall on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus.
Dr. Geiger, the Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine at the City University of New York Medical School, received the Institute of Medicine’s highest honor, the Lienhard Award, in 1998 for his “outstanding contributions to the advancement of minority health.” His six-decade career included international human rights missions to countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.
“Dr. Geiger’s contributions in the areas of public health, medicine, and human rights have undoubtedly made an everlasting impact in the lives of countless men, women, and children around the world,” said Jeff Nguyen, SPH Student Government co-president.
The process for selecting Geiger as this year’s commencement speaker differed from previous years. Instead of a faculty and staff selection committee with one student representative, the School’s student government, comprising representatives from each department, solicited suggestions from the student body and recommended Geiger to Dean Barbara K. Rimer.
In their invitation letter to Dr. Geiger, Nguyen and SPH Student Government co-president Mohamed Jalloh wrote, “We anticipate that our graduates will be ecstatic to find out that you have been offered this opportunity, in part, because it is evident that they have already been inspired by your work. In fact, your personal story continues to serve as an invaluable source of motivation.”
Geiger is perhaps best known for founding the first rural community health center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1965, alongside John Hatch, DrPH, a longtime University of North Carolina faculty member in the public health school’s Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. The Mound Bayou center was based in a poor region where sharecropping jobs had been lost after the modernization of cotton harvesting. It responded to community health problems with what were then innovative actions – including a food bank at the dispensary to address widespread malnutrition.
Geiger’s success came from combining community-oriented primary care and public health interventions with civil rights and community development initiatives. He recognized the importance of “social change that will prevent [medical] disasters from occurring in the first place.”
When challenged by administrators in Washington who believed pharmacies should dispense only medicines during the Mound Bayou project, Geiger responded, “The last time we looked in the book, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”
The Mound Bayou Health Center, together with Geiger’s urban health center in Boston, constituted the nation’s first network of community health centers. Today, more than 1,100 urban, rural and migrant community health centers across the nation provide crucial services to some 20 million patients each year who might otherwise receive no care at all.
Geiger also was a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1943 and was civil liberties chair of the American Veterans Committee from 1947-51, 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 chair of the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
In 1961, Geiger co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, which advocates nuclear disarmament from a public health perspective. In 1986, he was a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights, to bring a medical perspective to human rights abuse, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and to provide medical and humanitarian aid to victims of repression. Both of these organizations were recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nguyen and Jalloh are both master’s student expected to graduate in May – Nguyen from the Department of Health Policy and Administration and Jalloh from the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education.
For more details about the School’s commencement ceremony, UNC’s commencement or UNC’s doctoral hooding ceremony, visit /commencement/.
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.
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