Professional Honor — No Better Embodied than by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — too Bad There Has Been So Little Public Reflection on His Passing

27 February 2013

When we are content with petty and dishonorable people as heroes, we lose sight of the examples that genuine giants set

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop exemplified the epitome of professional virtue. Yet, his passing on 25 February 2013 created little murmur and virtually no widespread reflection.

Who was Dr. Koop?

From Alice Park at Time:

He was a pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia for 35 years, and when he was promoted to the nation’s physician in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, it would become the first public office he ever held.

Koop took a relatively obscure position in the government and over his seven-year tenure infused it with a responsibility and obligation to improve public health that his successors still strive to meet.

“While he was Surgeon General, he was America’s doctor,” says Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy and education for the American Lung Association.

“He recognized he was a highly visible spokesperson, and he was the personification of what the Surgeon General can and should be.”

The example that Dr. Koop set was much more than just excellence in delivering public health

As New Yorker writer, Michael Specter, implicitly points out, this often “gruff, unpleasant, and dismissive” evangelical Christian man behaved honorably during ideologically difficult times.

In spite of enthusiastic nomination support from Big Tobacco country’s arch-conservative Jesse Helms, Koop went on to become the first (insofar as I recall) very high ranking federal official to insist that second hand smoke caused lung cancer.

When AIDS struck homosexual men, Koop set aside his religious disapproval of homosexuality and his support for abstinence — and began a federal campaign supporting the use of condoms and generally acting as if the rest of America could not turn its back on victims of the then dread disease. He even went so far as to advocate sex education begin in third grade, including training in the use of condoms.

The irony of first impressions

Democrats opposed Dr. Koop’s nomination to public health’s top position because he was a committed evangelical Christian, fervent anti-abortionist, and determined spokesperson all children, “normal” or not.

In his political opponents’ minds, Dr. Koop’s zealous (apparent) self-righteousness might have negatively impacted women’s legitimately taken choices. What would the man do at the intersection of science and Christian belief?

As it turned out, Dr. Koop wound up choosing facts and science over ideology every time. Making him a friend of those who had opposed his nomination and a political enemy to those who had supported it.

Throughout, the Dr. Koop himself seems not to have changed. Which doesn’t say much about our acumen in supporting or opposing Senate confirmation nominees.

The moral? — Facts should trump ideology, when the two conflict — and honorable people act as if they do

Dr. Koop told Michael Specter:

“You know, I never changed my stripes during all that time, and I still haven’t,” Koop said.

“What I did in that job was what any well-trained doctor or scientist would do: I looked at the data and then presented the facts to the American people. In science, you can’t hide from the data.”

“One thing that I have learned is that belief doesn’t change reality.”

Surgeon General Koop was stalwart and consistently honorable — when it came to facing and acting on truth.

If there is an example of Government behavior that could save us from our fondness for air-headed rants, bog-sinking ideologies, and stone-cemented Denial — it’s his.

A pity that so few noticed.

PeteFree.com

Professional Honor — No Better Embodied than by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — too Bad There Has Been So Little Public Reflection on His Passing