C. Everett Co-op

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Everett Co-op

Charles Everett Koop , called Everett Koop, (born October 14, 1916 in Brooklyn , New York City , † February 25, 2013 in Hanover , New Hampshire ) was an American pediatric surgeon who served as Surgeon General of the United from 1982 to 1989 States was. He had the rank of Vice Admiral and was also known to the wider public for various health care initiatives.

biography

On his father's side, Koop came from a long-established New York family; his father was a banker. He studied at Dartmouth College with a Bachelor Accounts 1937 and medicine at the Medical College of Cornell University with MD 1941 (another doctorate he obtained in 1947 at the University of Pennsylvania ). From 1946 to 1981 he was the chief surgeon at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia . During this time he made a name for himself through some innovations in pediatric surgery, for example he separated several twins that had grown together. In 1959 he became professor of pediatric surgery and in 1971 of pediatrics at the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1966 he was the founding editor of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery .

Koop, who belonged to the Presbyterians , was an anti-abortionist who published the book The Right to Live, The Right to Die in 1976 and was involved in film projects by Christian anti-abortionists ( Francis Schaeffer ), which gave him influential contacts in the Republican Party . 1981 made him President Ronald Reagan to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and in 1982 the Surgeon General. Despite being an anti-abortionist, he resisted pressure from the Reagan administration to publish a report to address the alleged harm of abortion to the psyche of women (see Post-Abortion Syndrome ). For co-op, abortion was a moral issue, not a public health issue.

After some routine operations were not performed on a newborn baby named Baby Doe with Down syndrome in 1982 , which eventually led to his death, he passed a law that permitted such operations against the parents' wishes (Baby Doe Amendment, 1984).

The AIDS epidemic also fell during his time as Surgeon General . For the first four years of his term in office, he was not allowed to comment publicly (probably for political reasons), in the second half this was one of his main topics. He contributed to the objectification of the debates, published a first report in 1986 and in 1988 sent an educational brochure (the abridged version of the report) to every household.

Co-op was also known as a staunch opponent of smoking and went a long way towards changing public attitudes towards cigarettes in the United States.

In 1991 he had his own television series on medicine (C. Everett Koop, MD) on NBC , for which he received an Emmy . He was also Professor at Dartmouth College (Medical School) and Senior Scholar at the Everett Koop Institute.

He was a member of the American Philosophical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1990), the Institute of Medicine , the Royal College of Surgeons of England , the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow , the Royal Society of Medicine , Fellow from the American College of Surgeons and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh . He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, the NAS Public Welfare Medal in 1990 , was inducted into the Legion of Honor in 1980 and received the Léopold Griffuel Prize , the Maxwell Finland Award , the Heinz Award and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement . He received 41 honorary doctorates.

Everett Koop's first marriage was to Elizabeth Koop for almost 70 years, who died in 2007. With her he wrote a book ( Sometimes Mountains Move , 1974) about the situation of parents when their children die. The occasion was the death of her son, who died as a student in a mountain accident in 1968.

Web links

Commons : C. Everett co-op  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Holcomb Noble, New York Times obituary, Feb. 26, 2013
  2. Co-op papers