Most of the residents have little direct connection with the living wage issue at Harvard. Some of them come from surrounding communities and are active on other issues, such as public education and world trade, but not living wage issues-until now.

“It’s a community effort,” Burmann says. “It’s not just Harvard. It’s not just PSLM.”

Michael Greger, a general practitioner in Jamaica Plain, calls himself the tent city doctor. He spends his nights in tent number 73, where he has posted a sign with a red cross outside reading “the doctor is in.”

After the violent protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last winter, a network of activist physicians sprang up across the country. Greger is a member of one of these groups, the Northeast Action Medics Association, which has sent doctors to Philadelphia and Quebec for protests in those cities this year.

Greger says he supports the living wage cause and was especially attracted to the excitement of being a medic at a local protest.

“It’s great to have the living wage right in my backyard,” he says. “I couldn’t help but come out.”

Most of his time has been fairly routine so far-”usually it’s tampons, band-aids, Tylenol work,” he says-and he has also tended to some locals who came to him for medical attention, including a case of bruised ribs from someone who fell off a bike.

Monday night brought the first urgent protest-related medical situation: one of the protestors sitting in Mass Hall had an asthma attack and needed an inhaler. Gerger fished one out of his supplies and a police officer took it to the protester.