Personal Life
In the spring of 1968, Koop's son David was killed in a rock climbing accident on Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire during his junior year at Dartmouth College. While he was hammering a piton into the rock, a large section of the cliff sheared off from the mountain face, carrying him with it. The death was devastating for the family. Koop later wrote that because of his son's death he thought, "I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes." Years later, he and his wife wrote a book to help others who had lost a child. It was called Sometimes Mountains Move and described David's story and how the Koop family members each dealt with the grieving process.
Following his career as Surgeon General, and during the so-called dot-com craze, Koop and other investors established drkoop.com in 1998. This medical information website was one of the first major online sources of health information. However, critical review of the site content revealed that many of the private care listings, medicinal recommendations and medical trial referrals were in fact paid advertisements. Koop is no longer associated with the website. The address now re-directs to healthcentral.com. Koop also continues to endorse Life Alert bracelets for the elderly. Koop is currently the holder of three professorships at Dartmouth Medical School, as well as the senior scholar at DMS's C. Everett Koop Institute. He is also a recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.
He is currently sitting on The Firestorm Solutions Expert Council.
He hosted a documentary series in 1991, simply titled C. Everett Koop, M.D. It aired for six episodes on NBC.
His nickname among friends and colleagues is reportedly "Chick" (as in "Chicken Koop").
In February 2007, Elizabeth Koop, his wife of nearly 70 years, died. On April 17, 2010, he married Ms. Cora Hogue Koop, a former staff member of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. They currently live in New Hampshire.
Read more about this topic: C. Everett Koop
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