Leroy Edgar Burney | |
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| 8th Surgeon General of the United States | |
| In office August 8, 1956 – January 29, 1961 | |
| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy |
| Preceded by | Leonard A. Scheele |
| Succeeded by | Luther Leonidas Terry |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1906-12-31)December 31, 1906 Burney, Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | July 31, 1998(1998-07-31) (aged 91) Park Ridge, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Butler University Indiana University Bloomington |
Leroy Edgar Burney (December 31, 1906 – July 31, 1998) was an American physician and public health official. He was appointed the eighthSurgeon General of the United States from 1956 to 1961.
Burney was born inBurney, Indiana, a town founded by his great-grandfather. He began premedical coursework atButler University (1924–26) and completed both undergraduate and medical training atIndiana University Bloomington (Bachelor of Science, 1928;Doctor of Medicine, 1930). An introduction to thePublic Health Service (PHS) came through a one-yearinternship at theChicago Marine Hospital. Initiation into the world ofpublic health followed when Burney took advantage of a fellowship to study at theJohns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (Master of Science, 1931). Courtesy of the renownedepidemiologist Dr.W. H. Frost and theRockefeller Foundation, Burney was allowed to extend his studies for six months of field work at the Joint Health Department ofCharlottesville, Virginia,immunizing preschool children againstdiphtheria.
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 GeneralThomas Parran, Jr.’svenereal disease control programs, receiving specialized training at theNew York Marine Hospital (1934) and assisting in the management of rapid treatment centers around the country. Burney helped establish the first PHS mobile venereal diseaseclinic, inBrunswick, Georgia (1937–39), bringing access to treatment forAfrican Americans, whomJim Crowsegregation excluded from the predominantly white locations of other facilities.
Burney spent most ofWorld War II stateside, where he served as Assistant Chief of PHS's Division of State Relations (1943–44), except for a five-month detail to theNavy, where he traveled to theMediterranean on behalf of theWar Shipping Administration, to addressinfectious disease problems affecting ports. After the war, Burney continued his work with state and county health departments, directing PHS'sNew Orleans district office (1945) and then accepting a detail to be State Health Commissioner and Secretary ofIndiana's new State Board of Health (1945–54) and teach at theIndiana University School of Medicine. In 1954 Burney returned to PHS as an Assistant Surgeon General and Deputy Chief of theBureau of State Services, overseeing grants-in-aid to the states while being prepared for leadership by then-Surgeon GeneralLeonard A. Scheele.
When Surgeon General Scheele stepped down in August 1956,PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower nominated Burney on arecess appointment, and was sworn in as Surgeon General on August 8, 1956, and later confirmed by theSenate in January 1957. Surgeon General Burney applied his administrative know-how to steer PHS successfully through institutional growing pains as the agency responded to new and, at times, conflicting demands from the public, professional and voluntary advocacy groups, the parentDepartment, and theCongress. The key issues of the day wereenvironmental health and access to health services, the former driven by widely shared alarm over deteriorating environmental conditions andfallout from the atmospherictesting of nuclear weapons and the latter by expectations thatnational health insurance would soon be realized. In many ways theKerr-Mills Act of 1960, which authorized government financing of services forsenior citizens without adequate means to pay for care, prefigured theMedicare andMedicaid 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 GeneralWilliam H. Stewart, the Office of the Surgeon General's Division of Public Health Methods staffed a number of investigatory and advisory bodies whose reports still inform policy decisionmaking, including the Secretary's Consultants on Medical Research and Education (Bayne-Jones report, 1958); the Surgeon General's Consultant Group on Medical Education (Bane report, 1959); the Surgeon General's Report on Environmental Health Problems submitted to theHouse Appropriations Subcommittee (1959); and the Study Group on the Mission and Organization of the Public Health Service (Hundley report, 1960). In addition, during July 1957 Public Health Methods began implementing theNational Health Survey Act of 1956, conducting the first periodic national surveys of chronic diseasemorbidity and health services: the triennialHealth Interview Survey, and the mobile Health Examination Survey (which in 1971 became theHealth and Nutrition Examination Survey).
The Hundley Committee report urged that PHS shed the institutional remnants of its early missions (the hospitals andquarantine) and reorganize to better fulfill its post-1940 mandate to promote civilian public health. Unable to obtain formal authority from Congress but with permission from the Secretary ofUnited States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Burney began reorienting PHS structure to reflect its new functions. The Bureau of State Services was divided into two parts, one devoted to issues related to services delivery, under the rubric of "community health," and the other devoted toenvironmental health. Environmental programs were consolidated and upgraded, with new Division-level units created forradiological health (1957) andair pollution (1960) and a newNational Advisory Committee on Radiation. With the exception of the multidisciplinaryNational Institute of Mental Health, institutional boundaries were redrawn to distinguish services-oriented programs at theBureau of Medical Services from research at theNational Institutes of Health and from information gathering units such as theNational Library of Medicine groundbreaking forBethesda, Maryland facility in June, 1959 and theNational 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 oflung cancer, issuing statements that paved the way for his successor, Surgeon GeneralLuther L. Terry. Traditional public health functions remained no less important. During his tenure Burney played a leadership role in public health affairs both internationally chairing the U.S. delegation to the 1959 World Health Assembly and domestically serving as President of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers. In addition, he supported an effective response by theCommunicable Disease Center to the 1957Asian influenzapandemic and gave ongoing, measured support to the development of the oralpolio vaccine developed byAlbert Sabin.
On January 29, 1961, shortly after PresidentJohn F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Surgeon General Burney stepped down from his post to give the newDemocratic 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 andLyndon B. Johnson. After retiring from PHS, Burney served as Vice President for Health Sciences atTemple University and on the Board of the Milbank Memorial Fund until his retirement in 1990. He died on July 31, 1998, inPark Ridge, Illinois.
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