C. Everett Koop

Charles Everett Koop, M.D. (born October 14, 1916 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American physician. He served as the Surgeon General of the United States from 1982 to 1989, under Ronald Reagan's presidency. He was in a sense the first "celebrity Surgeon General"[1], and is probably still the best-known holder of the office. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (638x787, 298 KB) This image is a work of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, taken or made during the course of an employees official duties. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (638x787, 298 KB) This image is a work of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, taken or made during the course of an employees official duties. ... October 14 is the 287th day of the year (288th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1916 (MCMXVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... For other meanings, see Brooklyn (disambiguation). ... The Doctor by Samuel Luke Fildes This article is about the term physician, one type of doctor; for other uses of the word doctor see Doctor. ... US Public Health Service US Public Health Service Collar Device US Public Health Service Cap Device The Surgeon General of the United States is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Public Health Service, and - ex Officio - is the leading spokesperson on matters of public health in the Government... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). ...

Koop obtained his A.B. degree from Dartmouth College in 1937, where he was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity, 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 later, that he would be nominated as Surgeon General. Bachelor of Arts (B.A., BA or A.B.), from the Latin Artium Baccalaureus is an undergraduate bachelors degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. ... Dartmouth College is a private academic institution in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. ... 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... Alpha Sigma Phi (ΑΣΦ, commonly abbreviated to Alpha Sig) is a social fraternity with 68 active chapters, colonies, and interest groups. ... Cornell redirects here. ... The Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College is the medical school and biomedical research unit of Cornell University. ... This article is about the year. ... The 1940s decade ran from 1940 to 1949. ... The 1950s was the decade spanning from the 1st of January, 1950 to the 31st December, 1959. ... The University of Pennsylvania (or Penn[3][4]) is a private, nonsectarian research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ... The University of Pennsylvanias School of Medicine, presently located in the University City section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was the countrys first school of medicine, founded at the College of Philadelphia, as the University was then called. ... Pediatrics (also spelled paediatrics) is the branch of medicine that deals with the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents (from newborn to age 16-21, depending on the country). ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The presidential seal was used by President Hayes in 1880 and last modified in 1959 by adding the 50th star for Hawaii. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). ...

Koop is well known for four facets of his work:

• Abortion: Though Koop was philosophically opposed to abortion on personal religious grounds, he declined to state that abortion procedures performed by qualified medical professionals posed a substantial health risk to women, despite alleged political pressure to endorse such a position.
• Tobacco: In 1988 he published a report stating that nicotine has an addictiveness similar to that of heroin or cocaine. Koop's report was somewhat unexpected, especially by those who expected him to maintain the status quo in regard to his office's position on tobacco products. Koop also began the practice of placing warning labels on all packs of cigarettes which list the negative health effects.
• AIDS: Koop's tenure included the period during which public health authorities began to take notice of AIDS. Koop wrote the official U.S. policy on the syndrome, and took unprecedented action in mailing AIDS information to every U.S. household. Many were unhappy with the way in which he dealt with gay sex and the risk of infection through anal sex; Koop was unapologetic and explained his position in terms of such activities entailing risks several orders of magnitude greater than other means of transmission. Koop also infuriated former supporters on the right for insisting on sex education in schools, possibly as early as the third grade, including later instruction regarding the proper use of condoms to combat the spread of AIDS. While straightforwardly telling the public that this disease exists was controversial, Koop was criticized by health activists for a more subtle shift in public consciousness. Previously, government health agencies were expected to act to develop cures and vaccines for diseases. Under Koop, this was reduced to a "duty to warn".
• Baby Doe and the Rights of Handicapped Children: In April of 1982, a child born in Bloomington, Indiana was diagnosed as having Down's Syndrome, as well as esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula. Six days later, after court involvement and parental discussion involving disagreement among physicians about whether or not to treat the baby or let him die, the baby died, having been denied surgical treatment to correct his esophageal atresia and tracheoesophageal fistula. Baby Doe, as he would be known, became a symbol for children with birth defects, handicapped infants, and the debate over infanticide. Koop was not initially involved officially or unofficially with Baby Doe case, but still took special interest in the case since as pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia, he and his colleagues had operated on 475 such babies during his 35 years there, with ever increasing survival rates. During his last eight years in active practice, Koop never lost a full-term baby upon whom he operated to correct esophageal atresia. It was from this that Koop became actively involved in championing policies to protect newborns with handicaps.
• Profile: Taken together, these four issues combined with Dr. Koop's personality and his willingness to make use of mass media brought to the office of Surgeon General a higher public profile than it previously had merited; he is, for instance, the first Surgeon General to have been the subject of a popular song— "Promiscuous", by Frank Zappa. Koop was a somewhat eccentric and flamboyant figure, well-known for his mustache-less beard and colorful bow ties. He wore the Surgeon General's ceremonial military uniform (complete with medals) during much of his day-to-day work, reviving an old practice.

1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Nicotine is an alkaloid found in the nightshade family of plants (Solanaceae), predominantly in tobacco, and in lower quantities in tomato, potato, eggplant (aubergine), and green pepper. ... Heroin, also known as diamorphine (BAN) or diacetylmorphine (INN), is a semi-synthetic opioid. ... Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. ... ryan castiel ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Frank Vincent Zappa[1] (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American composer, guitarist, singer, film director, and satirist. ... One option to tie a bowtie The bowtie is a mens fashion accessory, popularly worn with other formal attire, such as suits. ...

The "Koop Report"

On July 30, 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan directed Koop to prepare a report on the effects of abortion on women. Koop didn't want to write the report, for an assortment of personal and professional reasons. He tried repeatedly to beg off, but Reagan insisted. Koop passed the task off to his staff. The research and preparations for the planned report became largely the task of one George Walter. Walter obtained a list of articles from the Centers for Disease Control, mostly authored by CDC abortion surveillance staff, and engaged in extensive consultations with employees of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. After the meetings and the review of the articles provided by the CDC, Koop drafted and sent a letter to the President, concluding that there had been no unassailable studies of the long-term impact of abortion. July 30 is the 211th day (212th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 154 days remaining. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975). ... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta is recognized as the lead United States agency for protecting the public health and safety of people by providing credible information to enhance health decisions, and promoting health through strong partnerships with state health departments and other organizations. ... The Alan Guttmacher Institute is a research institute that provides global and U.S. specific demographic statistics on reproductive matters such as birth control and abortion. ...

Koop directed his staff to drop the project on January 10, 1989, hoping Reagan would be content with the letter. Nevertheless, George Walter proceeded to re-write the report, submitting it to Koop on January 17. Koop instructed Walter to shelve the draft, and not to release any report about abortion from his office. Instead, Walter released the draft under Koop's name.

During his testimony before a Congressional committee investigating these events, Koop repeatedly tried to distance himself from the report with vague statements about not having read it.

The end result of the episode was the creation of a "Koop Report" that was neither researched, nor written, nor approved by Koop, but which was nonetheless sometimes touted as verification by Koop himself of the indisputable safety of induced abortion.

Medical Career

Although he was most widely known among Americans for his years being the Surgeon General, the vast bulk of Koop's career was actually spent as a practicing physician. For 35 years, from 1946 to 1981, he was the surgeon-in-chief at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and this at a time when pediatric surgery as a specialty was moving from its infancy to a full fledged profession. (When Koop established the pediatric surgical division at CHOP in 1946, it was the first such service in Philadelphia and only the second such service established in North America behind Boston, where Dr. William E. Ladd and Dr. Robert E. Gross had pioneered pediatric surgical services.) Koop was able to establish the nation's first neonatal surgical intensive care unit there in 1956. He helped establish the biliary atresia program at CHOP when pioneering surgeon Dr. Morio Kasai came to work with him in the 1970s. He also established the pediatric surgery fellowship training program at CHOP. During his tenure there he graduated thirty-five residents and fourteen foreign fellows, many of whom went on to become professors of pediatric surgery, directors of divisions of pediatric surgery, and surgeons-in-chief of children's hospitals.

Koop was active in publishing articles in the medical literature. Koop later wrote that "each day of those early years in pediatric surgery I felt I was on the cutting edge. Some of the surgical problems that landed on the operating table at Children's had not even been named. Many of the operations I performed had never been done before. It was an exuberant feeling, but also a little scary. At times I was troubled by fears that I wasn't doing things the right way, that I would have regrets, or that someone else had performed a certain procedure successfully but had never bothered to write it up for the medical journals, or if they had I couldn't find it." Koop helped rectify this by publishing his own findings and results. Additionally he became the first editor of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery when it was founded in 1966.

In contrast to his years as Surgeon General, when it was his policies and speeches that had bearing on other people, his years as an operating pediatric surgeon involved a more individualized, direct, hands-on affect on others. During the course of his long career, for example, he performed some seventeen thousand inguinal hernia repairs and over seven thousand orchiopexies (surgery for correcting undescended testicle). He developed new procedures, such as the colon interposition graft for correcting esophageal atresia (congenital lack of continuity of the esophagus) or ventriculoperitoneal shunts for treatment of hydrocephalus (accumulation of excessive cerebral spinal fluid in and around the brain causing neurological problems). He also tackled many difficult cases ranging from childhood cancer cases to surgeries done on conjoined (Siamese) twins, of which he and his colleagues operated upon ten such pairs during his 35 year tenure. In all he operated on many children and babies with congenital defects 'incompatible with life but amenable to surgical correction'.

Much of the opposition that Koop later faced in being confirmed as President Reagan's choice as Surgeon General came from his widely known views about right to life. In 1976, after spending an entire Saturday with his pediatric surgery fellows operating on three patients with severe congenital defects, Koop sat in the cafeteria and remarked that together they had given over two hundred years of life to three individuals who together barely weighed ten pounds. When one of the surgical fellows replied that next door at the university hospital abortions were being performed on healthy babies, Koop was stirred to write The Right to Live, The Right to Die, setting down his concerns about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Koop also took some time off from his surgical practice to make a series of films with Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer entitled "Whatever Happened to the Human Race". These films, along with a book published by the same name, reflected Koop's opposition to abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia and fired much of the controversy and initial antagonism that surrounded Koop's nomination for Surgeon General.

Other activities

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 at Dartmouth College. While 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. Dr. 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, 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. Dr. Koop is no longer associated with the website, which continues to be active. Koop also continues to endorse Life-Alert bracelets for the elderly. In the advertisements, the senior citizen is heard saying, "Help, I've fallen, and I can't get up". Dr. Koop is currently the holder of three professorships at the 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. 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Dartmouth Medical School is the medical school of Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. ... The Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism was established in 1986 by Albert Toepfer, an international grain merchant from Hamburg, Germany, to advance the cause of humanitarianism by recognizing exemplary contributions to humanity and the environment. ...

He hosted a documentary series in 1991, simply titled C. Everett Koop, M.D.. It aired for six episodes on NBC.[2] To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... It has been suggested that NBC, NBC Radio City Studios, NBC Studios be merged into this article or section. ...

His nickname among friends and colleagues is reportedly "Chick" (as in Chicken Koop). [3]

In a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Koop was referenced in a Be-Sharps song. Simpsons redirects here. ...

Koop was also the subject of an interview by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for HBO's Da Ali G Show. Sacha Noam Baron Cohen [1] (born October 13, 1971) is an English comedian and actor notable for his successful and controversial comic characters, including Ali G (a junglist from West Staines, England), Borat (a Kazakh reporter) and Bruno (a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter). ... Da Ali G Show was the name of two related satirical and socratically ironic TV series starring British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and featuring the character Ali G. The original (single season) series was made by Channel 4 in the UK, and the second (two season) series by HBO in...

In 2006, Dr. Koop began appearing in television ads endorsing Life Alert. Life Alert is a company that provides services that help the elderly contact emergency services. ...

Bibliography

• Visible and Palpable Lesions in Children by C. Everett Koop, M.D., Sc.D. Grune & Stratton 1976 ISBN 0-8089-0958-4
• The Right to Live: The Right to Die by C. Everett Koop, M.D., Tyndale 1976 ISBN 0842355936
• Sometimes Mountains Move by C. Everett and Elizabeth Koop. Tyndale 1979 ISNB 0842360646
• Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by C. Everett Koop, M.D. and Francis A. Schaeffer. Crossway Books 1979/1983 revised ISBN 0891072918
• Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor by C. Everett Koop, M.D. Harper-Zondervan 1992 ISBN 0-310-59772-2
• Let's Talk: An Honest Conversation on Critical Issues: Abortion, AIDS, Euthanasia, Healthcare by C. Everett Koop, M.D. and Timothy Johnson. Zondervan 1992 ISBN 0310597811

External links

• Biography at Dartmouth College
• Biography at surgeongeneral.gov
• [4] Exposé on drkoop.com