Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and Its War on Poverty by Thomas J. Ward Jr., H. Jack Geiger

Out in the Rural is the unlikely story of the Tufts-Delta Health Center, which in 1966 opened in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to become the first rural community health center in the United States. It is also the unlikely story of the health center’s founder, Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a former teenage runaway who through a serendipitous turn of events was befriended and taken in by actor and Harlem Renaissance icon Canada Lee. Geiger’s personal history brings a profound human element to what was accomplished deep in the Mississippi Delta: in addition to providing medical care, the staff of the Tufts-Delta Health Center worked upstream to address the fundamental determinants of health — factors such as education, poverty, nutrition, and the environment — and ask the question “What does it take to stay healthy?” Equal parts social history and personal history, Out in the Rural is a story of both community health and of a stranger’s kindness paid forward.