History
In 1798, Congress established the Marine Hospital Service—predecessor to today’s United States Public Health Service—to provide health care to sick and injured merchant seamen. In 1870, the Marine Hospital Service was reorganized as a national hospital system with centralized administration under a medical officer, the Supervising Surgeon, who was later given the title of Surgeon General.
The U.S. Public Health Service was under the direction of the Office of the Surgeon General and was an independent government agency until 1953 at which point it was integrated into the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and later into the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Some Surgeons General have been noted for being outspoken and advocating controversial proposals on how to reform the U.S. health system. The office is not a particularly powerful one, and has little direct impact on policy-making, but Surgeons General are often vocal advocates of unconventional or unpopular health policies.
- In 1964, Luther Terry, M.D., published a landmark report saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking nationwide anti-smoking efforts. Terry and his committee defined cigarette smoking of nicotine as not an addiction (the committee was made of largely physicians who themselves smoked). This error wasn't corrected for 24 years.
- In 1986, Vice Admiral C. Everett Koop's report on AIDS called for some form of AIDS education in the early grades of elementary school and gave full support for using condoms for disease prevention.
- In 1994, Vice Admiral Joycelyn Elders had spoken at a United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity, and she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught."
The U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force also have officers overseeing medical matters in their respective services who hold the title Surgeon General.
The insignia of the Surgeon General, and the USPHS, use the caduceus. See Caduceus as a symbol of medicine.
Read more about this topic: Surgeon General Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)