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Robert S. Lawrence, MD, a founding member of PHR and the Chair of PHR’s Board of Directors, has been awarded the Sedgwick Memorial Medal at the 137th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). The medal, considered the APHA’s most prestigious award, was presented at a ceremony in Philadelphia on November 10, 2009. The Medal recognizes Dr. Lawrence as

an individual who has demonstrated a distinguished record of service to public health while tirelessly working to advance public health knowledge and practice.

Upon learning of the award, PHR’s CEO, Frank Donaghue, said:

Physicians for Human Rights warmly congratulates and applauds our Board Chair, Robert Lawrence, MD, the recipient of one of the highest honors bestowed by the APHA. The 2009 Sedgwick Memorial Medal — a true accolade of the profession — signals colleagues’ recognition of Dr. Lawrence’s exemplary accomplishments in the field of public health. His leadership has helped PHR bring a human rights perspective to vital issues such as fighting global AIDS, strengthening the health workforce, addressing inequities faced by women and children, and promoting accountability and governance in health systems.

The Sedgwick Medal honors Dr. Lawrence’s long and remarkable career in public service. As Professor and Director of the Center for a Livable Future at The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Lawrence has worked to eliminate racial and income-based disparities in health-care access across the United States. Educated at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Lawrence has taught at top US universities, served as a director of health sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation and has been a principal force for establishment of human rights programs in schools of public health. He is a member of the prestigious Institute of Medicine and is a past recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Prize.

Dr. Lawrence co-founded PHR, and has participated in human rights investigations with PHR and other organizations in countries including Chile, the former Czechoslovakia, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, the Philippines, and South Korea and South Africa.

Today marks a victory for PHR and all of you who have been working to lift the US HIV travel ban. This morning, while signing the fourth reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act, President Obama  vowed to “publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year.”

Obama said:

Twenty-two years ago in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS.  Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease — yet we’ve treated a visitor living with it as a threat.  We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic — yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from HIV from entering our own country. If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it.

The final rule will remove the HIV infection from the list of “communicable disease of public health significance,” no longer require HIV testing as part of the US immigration screening process and eliminate the need for a waiver to enter the country as an HIV carrier.

Please read Obama’s statement, his first public address about HIV/AIDS where he illustrates his commitment to make the United States a global leader in tackling HIV/AIDS and erasing its stigma.  Also check out PHR’s press release on this important victory.

Said PHR CEO Frank Donaghue:

Today is a great day for human rights and for people living with AIDS, their friends and their families. The HIV Travel Ban made the United States a pariah in human rights circles, and harmed our reputation as a world leader of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care. Starting in 2010, people living with HIV will no longer be prevented from entering this country, no longer turned away at customs, no longer forced to hide their condition and interrupt medical treatment, and no longer be treated by our government with contempt.

We’re celebrating in Cambridge and DC; we hope you are too. This is an amazing victory for all of you who have worked so hard to promote and protect the human rights of people living with AIDS!

Leon Eisenberg, MD

Physicians for Human Rights mourns the loss of child psychiatrist, medical educator, and human rights advocate Leon Eisenberg, MD, husband of PHR founding board member Carola Eisenberg, MD.

PHR CEO Frank Donaghue said:

The board and staff of Physicians for Human Rights express our appreciation for Leon’s lifelong commitment to the advancement of human rights, and extend our deepest sympathies to his wife, Carola, and his family and friends. We will all miss our dear friend and colleague.

PHR Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin added:

Leon was a towering figure in advancing social medicine and passionate about human rights and dignity. He will be deeply missed.

The American Academy of Arts Sciences captured many of  Dr. Eisenberg’s accomplishments in a death notice published in the New York Times:

To the medical community, he contributed pathbreaking work in child psychiatry and an abiding concern with the relation between the practice of medicine and the lives of patients. As the Communications Secretary of the Academy for seven years, he informed our work with his gentle humor and his wide-ranging knowledge and interests. He helped to ensure that merit and diversity were the hallmarks of our membership and that the communication of information and ideas across fields and professions was our responsibility to society.

PHR is deeply moved and grateful that Dr. Eisenberg’s family has requested that in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Physicians for Human Rights or Partners In Health.

Last year, Harvard Medical School’s Focus Online profiled Dr. Eisenberg. The piece described Eisenberg’s difficult entry into medical school in the 1940s; he was a straight A student but most schools would not admit him because he was a Jew. He was eventually admitted to Pennsylvania School of Medicine, rose to the top of his class and graduated valedictorian. He was nonetheless denied an internship, along with the seven other Jews who applied, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

He went to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, where he discovered psychiatry….  In 1952, after a two-year stint in the Army teaching physiology to military doctors, he began a residency in child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, where his doubts about psychoanalysis were encouraged by the great psychiatrist, Leo Kanner….

Eisenberg would join him in his exploration of the newly identified psychiatric disorder, autism, paying special attention to the social, and especially, the family setting of the children in which it appeared.

Though Eisenberg suspected a genetic basis to the then rarely diagnosed disease, it would be years before the tools existed to look at it. In subsequent years, he turned his attention to more common childhood problems, such as school phobia, looking once again at the social setting in which they occurred.

In 1962, Eisenberg launched the first randomized clinical trial of a psychiatric medicine. “As simple as it seems, as straightforward, child psychiatry had gone on for 40 years before somebody did a randomized clinical trial,” said Earls.

The Focus piece also noted Dr. Eisenberg’s role in increasing the number of Black students at Harvard Medical School.

“Since being Jewish was no longer an issue in medical school after about 1950, I had thought that my job was to fight for the people who were being excluded, which were blacks,” he said. He was asked to chair the HMS commission on black community relations and the HMS admissions committee for the first seven years of affirmative action. “It was a wonderful place to see to it that the plan was implemented.”

Dr. Eisenberg’s commitment to fairness was constant and always included a focus on the institutions that he worked in.

A case in point was a festschrift held on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Former students presented an extraordinary array of papers, each of which Eisenberg thoroughly critiqued.

“At the end, when you would have expected Leon simply to say, ‘I’m so delighted, and I want to thank you for what you’ve done,’ well, he said all those things, and then he said, ‘You know, I just want to be honest with you,’” said Kleinman. “‘You’ve all become professors now, and you’re all outstanding in what you do, but I want to ask you this—have you used your tenure to go up against the system that we’re in? Have you spoken out?’”

With great admiration for Dr. Eisenberg’s contributions to psychiatry, medical education and human rights, the entire PHR staff extends our condolences to his wife, Carola; to his family; and to all who have been his friends, colleagues and students.