GUEST COLUMN
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September 2009
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist:
Dr. Jeremy Kark
Dr. Jeremy Kark is the son of Sidney and Emily Kark, pioneering physicians who developed a model approach to community health in South Africa in the 1940s.
Q: What does "health and human rights" mean to you?
A: I have opted to respond in the name of my South African-born parents whose own parents and grandparents emigrated from Lithuania from 1878 onwards to escape the repression, persecution and pogroms experienced by Lithuanian Jewry. They were drawn by the possibility of a better life for their families to countries such as the USA, South Africa and Palestine. Sidney (born in Johannesburg in 1911) and Emily Kark (1913) were acutely aware, as were many of their cohort, of the systematic injustice and exploitation imposed by the white-dominated system on indigenous Africans. These young people acted in many ways--some through political activism, assuming leadership roles in the liberal movements of South Africa. Sidney and Emily, both medical students at 'Wits' (the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg) in the 1930s, channeled their energies into ways to rectify massive inequalities in health, which they believed had underlying political and consequently social determinants.
A: I have opted to respond in the name of my South African-born parents whose own parents and grandparents emigrated from Lithuania from 1878 onwards to escape the repression, persecution and pogroms experienced by Lithuanian Jewry. They were drawn by the possibility of a better life for their families to countries such as the USA, South Africa and Palestine. Sidney (born in Johannesburg in 1911) and Emily Kark (1913) were acutely aware, as were many of their cohort, of the systematic injustice and exploitation imposed by the white-dominated system on indigenous Africans. These young people acted in many ways--some through political activism, assuming leadership roles in the liberal movements of South Africa. Sidney and Emily, both medical students at 'Wits' (the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg) in the 1930s, channeled their energies into ways to rectify massive inequalities in health, which they believed had underlying political and consequently social determinants.