[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Page 25440]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO DR. JACK GEIGER

 Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, I would like to take this 
opportunity to recognize an outstanding leader from New York who has 
spent his entire career championing improved health for minorities. Dr. 
Jack Geiger has been a pioneer in medical care for underserved 
populations through his dedicated work as a human rights advocate, 
scholar, educator, and physician. In commemoration of his 80th birthday 
this month, I would like to congratulate him on the extraordinary 
accomplishments he has achieved during his career that have impacted so 
many people in our Nation and in other countries.
  For more than 60 years, Dr. Geiger has promoted human rights in the 
health field. In fact, he was one of the earliest leaders to advance 
the idea of health care as a civil right. He helped pioneer the 
American health centers movement by creating the first health centers 
in rural Mississippi and inner-city Boston, which then burgeoned into a 
network of more than 900 urban, rural, and migrant centers serving 
millions of low-income patients today.
  It is difficult to cover all of Dr. Geiger's work in addressing human 
rights violations in the health sector because his contributions are so 
numerous. In the 1940s and 1950s, he led campaigns to end racial 
discrimination in hospitals and medical schools. In the 1960s, he 
helped provide medical care to civil rights workers. Later, he helped 
found and head the Physicians for Human Rights, a national organization 
of health professionals that investigates human rights abuses and war 
crimes and provides medical aid to victims of oppression. This 
organization shared in the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1998. In more 
recent years, he has served as the president of the Committee for 
Health in Southern Africa and as an NGO delegate to the United Nations 
Conference on Racism and Discrimination, in addition to leading several 
human rights missions abroad.
  Dr. Geiger also has been a prolific researcher and author of numerous 
articles, book chapters, reports, and monographs on such topics as 
community-oriented primary care and community health centers, poverty 
and health care, the role of physicians in the protection of human 
rights, and health effects of nuclear war. Most recently, he has 
contributed to seminal reports on racial and ethnic disparities in 
clinical diagnosis and treatment.
  As an educator and a physician, Dr. Geiger has produced generations 
of committed health professionals throughout the world and has provided 
medical care to countless patients and communities of all backgrounds. 
Before assuming his current position as Arthur C. Logan Professor 
Emeritus of Community Medicine at City University of New York Medical 
School and Visiting Professor of Epidemiology at Mailman-Columbia 
School of Public Health, he served as Chairman of the Department of 
Community Medicine at Tufts University Medical School, Visiting 
Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chairman of the 
Department of Community Medicine at State University of New York at 
Stony Brook School of Medicine. There is no doubt that this 
extraordinary man embodies the true meaning of ``doctor'' and has 
positively changed the lives of tens of thousands of people.
  For his work on health care, human rights, and poverty, Dr. Gieger 
has been recognized with scores of illustrious awards; most recently, 
he was the recipient of the Award for Academic Leadership in Primary 
Care from Morehouse School of Medicine in 2003 and the Paul Cornely 
Award from the Physicians Forum in 2004. It is only fitting that we 
acknowledge this health champion today. I congratulate Dr. Geiger on a 
lifetime full of remarkable accomplishments and am proud to honor his 
80th birthday.

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