Essay - Luther Terry Was the Surgeon General of the United States...

Luther Terry was the Surgeon General of the United States during the Kennedy Administration and ***** first part of the Johnson Administration, from 1961 to 1965. Terry changed ***** nature of the office, which until that time was obscure enough so ***** many Americans did not know ********** was such a post. Since Terry's time, and specifically because of one important action he took, the office of Surgeon General has been more prominent, taking the lead in public health issues ***** ruffling feathers in many American *****dustries. Terry issued his report on smoking and its dangers in 1964, *****ing to the greater prominence of anti-*****bacco forces, the warnings ***** cigarette packages, the banning of cigarette ads on television and radio, and recently court and legislative ********** taken against ***** tobacco industry after decades of resistance.

********** action in issu*****g the report on smoking is much better known than Terry himself, as Patton ***** Barron *****e when they writes,

Before *****, ***** Luther Terry ********** his famous report on smoking, few people knew that there was such a thing as the United States ***** General, and ********** still knew his name. Today every*****e knows of the Surgeon General, but who can name the one behind the ***** General's report? (***** and Barron 90).

There ***** been a Surgeon General with that title since 1871. Congress had established the U. S. Marine Hospital Service in 1798, ***** ***** was the predecessor of today's *****.S. Public Health Service. The purpose was to provide health care to sick and injured merchant seamen. ***** ***** Hospital Service was reorganized in 1870 as a national hospital system with centralized administration under a medic*****l **********, the Supervising Surgeon, later change to the Surgeon General ("His*****ry ***** the Office of the Surgeon General"). The service became the Public Health Service in 1912 and was made ***** of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953. Luther L. Terry ***** ***** General in *****. His research specialty had been hypertension, a problem clearly linked to smoking. Terry joined the Public Health ***** in 1941, when he was in his early thirties, and he would end his career ***** 1982 as a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He clearly changed the *****fice:

After Terry, the Surgeon ***** became a character on the political stage, and ***** successors as C. Everett Koop in ***** 1980s and Joycelyn Elders in the 1990s frequently ***** the center of it in debates about issues ranging from abortion to drug legalization (Pat*****n and Barron 90).

For most of *****s *****tory, the office of ***** General w***** noncontroversial. That would change ***** *****uther L. ***** and his ***** report and recommendations, though interestingly Terry was not the first Surgeon ***** to address this question. Surgeon General Hugh Cumming in 1929 stated that "cigarettes tended to cause nervousness, insomnia, and other ill effects in women" and "warned ***** smoking could lower the 'physical tone' of the nation" (Paras*****dola 440). *****'s challenge to smoking