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.
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
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.
[1] 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.
[5] 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.
[4] Jack Caughey of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine was encouraging and Geiger successfully enrolled in 1954.
[7] This system entailed the concept that medicine could both attend to the physical ills of the people in those communities but also the structural problems that affected health, like poverty for example.
[8] In 1961, Geiger cofounded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which argued that the government was understating the extent of destruction a nuclear war would cause.
[2] He coauthored one of the first papers to estimate the medical toll of nuclear war, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in May 1962, just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[2] Taking Boston as a case study, it predicted a nuclear strike would leave millions dead and injured, vastly outstripping the hospital capacity that would remain to treat those who (initially) survived.
[10] In 1965, he organized medical care for the participants of the Selma to Montgomery march with Martin Luther King, Jr.[10] Working in the US South, he found many African Americans were living in conditions strikingly similar to the extreme poverty he had seen in apartheid South Africa and realized the health disparities abroad that he wanted to address also existed much closer to home.
[4] President Lyndon B. Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity (part of the War on Poverty) as well as grants from Tufts University afforded him and two other doctors, John Hatch and Count Gibson, the chance to set up a clinic in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, which they modeled after the one Geiger had seen in South Africa: not only treating sick patients but also spending grant money digging wells and privies, establishing a library, and a variety of other social, educational and economic services.
[2] Here Geiger wrote controversial prescriptions for food, paid out of the pharmacy budget, which drew the displeasure of the state's Governor.
[12] In 1986, Geiger was a cofounder (and later president) of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its contributions to the effort to ban land mines.
[13] Geiger participated in human rights missions for PHR, the United Nations, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Kurdistan, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and South Africa.