Jonathan Fine

Jonathan E. Fine (1931–2018) was an American primary care physician based in Massachusetts and the founder and first executive director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. As part of PHR, he helped pioneer the study of abuses that affected large groups or populations, such as war. He advocated for the use of epidemiology and population-based science to recount events and horrors people suffered.

Early studies, career, and advocacy Fine was the son of Jacob and Anne Fine and was born in Boston, where his father was the Chief of Surgery at Beth Israel Hospital. While finishing his studies, he was awarded a Fulbright grant to study health needs in India. This led him to become interested in poverty overseas and in injustice. In Boston, he was appointed the city's deputy health commissioner and director of public health and community services. Fine, then 55, resigned from his job to pursue PHR full time. He financed the organization personally, selling his house in order to fund staff salaries, office space, and the international investigations themselves in the early years.

Since its inception, PHR has worked in 60 different countries and undertook more than 70 missions in its first decade. Fine led many of the early investigations himself, including those of the use of teargas in South Korea, the deployment of chemical weapons against Kurds in Iraq, and injuries to protestors in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. In 1997, PHR was part of a coalition campaigning for a ban on landmines that was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

Later life Fine retired from PHR in 1993, at the age of 62. He then directed a center for Brazilian immigrants in Boston and supported local doctors in Chhattisgarh, India. In 2007, at age 75, he founded Bedside Advocates to help elderly and frail patients navigate the complex medical system. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 17, 2018, aged 86 years.