Early Years
Koop was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father John Everett Koop (1883–1972) and his mother Helen (née Apel) Koop (1894–1970) were both German immigrants, and Koop was their only child. He obtained his A.B. degree from Dartmouth College in 1937 and his M.D. degree from Cornell Medical College in 1941. During the 1940s and 1950s he rose in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to become professor of pediatric surgery and, later, professor of pediatrics. In February 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Koop as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health with the promise, fulfilled a year and nine months later, that he would be nominated as Surgeon General.
Read more about this topic: C. Everett Koop
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
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“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
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“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
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