Leroy Edgar Burney

Leroy Edgar Burney
Leroy Edgar Burney
	Luther Leonidas Terry
Personal details
Born	December 31, 1906; Burney, Indiana, US
Died	July 31, 1998 (aged 91); Park Ridge, Illinois, US

Leroy Edgar Burney (December 31, 1906 – July 31, 1998) was an American physician and public health official. He was appointed the eighth Surgeon General of the United States from 1956 to 1961.

Biography

Early years

Burney was born in

immunizing preschool children against diphtheria

.

Career

Burney, a resident of Charlottesville, sought for and was approved as an Assistant Surgeon in the PHS Regular Corps (1932). His area of expertise would be public health administration at the state and local level, the front lines of public health. Like many of his generation at PHS, Burney came up through the ranks of then-Surgeon General

Jim Crow segregation

excluded from the predominantly white locations of other facilities.

Burney spent most of

infectious disease problems affecting ports. After the war, Burney continued his work with state and county health departments, directing PHS's New Orleans district office (1945) and then accepting a detail to be State Health Commissioner and Secretary of Indiana's new State Board of Health (1945–54) and teach at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In 1954 Burney returned to PHS as an Assistant Surgeon General and Deputy Chief of the Bureau of State Services, overseeing grants-in-aid to the states while being prepared for leadership by then-Surgeon General Leonard A. Scheele

.

Surgeon General

When Surgeon General Scheele stepped down in August 1956,

senior citizens without adequate means to pay for care, prefigured the Medicare and Medicaid

programs that would transform national policy during the following decades.

In response, Burney mustered his leadership to gather facts, draft plans for modernizing PHS and take action. Under future Surgeon General

morbidity and health services: the triennial Health Interview Survey, and the mobile Health Examination Survey (which in 1971 became the Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

).

The Hundley Committee report urged that PHS shed the institutional remnants of its early missions (the hospitals and

National Library of Medicine groundbreaking for Bethesda, Maryland facility in June, 1959 and the National Center for Health Statistics

established in August 1960, comprising Public Health Method's surveys group and PHS's National Vital Statistics Division.

Surgeon General Burney also refashioned his position to emphasize his role as a spokesperson on behalf of public health. In 1957 and again in 1959, he was the first Federal official to publicly identify cigarette smoke as a cause of

Asian influenza pandemic and gave ongoing, measured support to the development of the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin

.

Later years

On January 29, 1961, shortly after President

Democratic administration the opportunity to nominate its own choice for Surgeon General. Reforms and ideas raised during Burney's administration would become the foundations of health policy under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. After retiring from PHS, Burney served as Vice President for Health Sciences at Temple University and on the Board of the Milbank Memorial Fund until his retirement in 1990. He died on July 31, 1998, in Park Ridge, Illinois

.

References

Office of Public Health and Science (4 January 2007). "Office of the Surgeon General: Leroy Edgar Burney (1956-1961)". U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Archived from the original on 16 September 2008. Retrieved 2008-01-17.

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