New Surgeon General

In 1930 when he was Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt suddenly found himself in need of a State Commissioner of Health. After surveying the field he called to Albany an aggressive, tweed) Marylander named Thomas Parran Jr. Dr. Parran at the time was an assistant Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt went to Washington as President. There this year he again found himself in need of a health commissioner, this time for the entire nation, when Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming, 66, resigned. Last week President Roosevelt called Dr. Parran back to Washington, nominated him Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service.

Middle-aged U. S. doctors were generally opposed to Dr. Parran's appointment. They were educated, trained and licensed to earn their living from fees which their patients paid them. Now a large part of the population can no longer afford to pay any doctor bills whatsoever. To get around that economic difficulty doctors have invented several hundred prepay and partial-pay schemes, including $10-a-year hospitalization insurance (see p. 50). Dr. Parran does not believe such systems will solve the problem of patientless doctors and doctorless patients. He wants socialized medicine, with free drugs and hospital service to every inhabitant of the U. S. who cannot afford them. As filler for doctors' pocketbooks he would permit the present system of the private practice of medicine to continue, would have private practitioners dispense the free drugs, assign patients to the free hospitals. By the nature of Dr. Parran's plans, thousands of the 167,000 doctors in this country would be obliged to take jobs with city, state or Federal medical agencies. They would thus abandon the legalized privileges of the professional man, the right to deal only with such clients as please them, the right to do whatever they think best for their clients.

Because it was politically unfocused, opposition to Dr. Parran as Surgeon General fizzled out, and the Senate last week quietly confirmed his appointment to a job which pays him $9,800 a year instead of the $12,000 a year he was getting while in Albany.

Leaving Albany is a pleasant inconvenience for Dr. Parran. The year Governor Roosevelt called him there he, a widower with four small sons, remarried, and took a big white farmhouse in the hills at Castleton, N. Y.. overlooking the Hudson, ten miles south of Albany. The grounds include a pear and apple orchard, the pruning of which he made one of his hobbies. Other diversions: hunting, riding, training red setters, splitting firewood, baking waffles to eat with Maryland scrapple. Sunday the whole family decorously went to mass in the Roman Catholic Church of the village. After mass the whole family often tramped the woods.

Dr. Parran was born at St. Leonard, Md., in 1892, in a glazed-brick house which a Parran built in 1655. Builder Parran brought the bricks from England as ballast for a tobacco ship. The Parrans who have lived there continuously have all been tobacco growers, except a Thomas who was a doctor during the American Revolution. The new Surgeon General graduated from Georgetown University Medical School in 1915, has done able public health work in a dozen states. He is president-elect of the American Public Health Association, trustee of the Phipps Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, a scientific director of the Rockefeller Foundation.

In his new job he will supervise the spending of some $10,000,000 on the regular duties of the U. S. Public Health Service for the year, and an additional $10,000,000 which the Social Security Act puts in his charge. Dr. Parran's most immediate task will be to map sanitary rehabilitation in Eastern states which were flooded last fortnight. His medical hobby is to remove the U. S. taboo from public discussions of venereal diseases, to make syphilis as rare in the U. S. as it is in the Scandinavian countries, which he visits whenever he gets time and traveling expenses.

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