Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History) by John Parascandola

Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History) by John Parascandola

Author:John Parascandola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-18T20:54:00+00:00


THOMAS PARRAN AND THE NEW CRUSADE AGAINST SYPHILIS

In 1936 the campaign against syphilis was rejuvenated with the appointment of Thomas Parran to succeed Hugh Cumming as Surgeon General of the PHS. As previously mentioned, Parran had served as the head of the PHS's DVD in the late 1920s. Parran was born on September 28, 1892 and raised on his family's tobacco farm near St. Leonard's, Maryland. He obtained his undergraduate education at St. John's College in Annapolis and earned his M.D. degree from Georgetown University in 1915. During his medical school years, he spent two summers working as a volunteer in the health laboratory of the District of Columbia under Joseph Kinyoun, who had earlier in his career served in the PHS. From 1887 to 1899, Kinyoun served as the first director of the Service's Hygienic Laboratory, which was later to evolve into the National Institutes of Health. Under Kinyoun's influence, Parran joined a PHS field team building sanitary privies and surveying rural health conditions in the South in 1917. That same year he became a member of the PHS Commissioned Corps.57

Parran spent the next nine years on a number of assignments for the PHS, most of them involving rural health, sanitation, and communicable disease control. In 1926 he obtained his first leadership position when he was appointed chief of the PHS Division of Venereal Diseases. Parran shifted the Division's emphasis from areas such as sex education toward more scientific pursuits such as research, health surveys, and treatment demonstrations.58

As previously noted, the budget of the DVD had been slashed by the time Parran became its head, and he may not have been sorry to leave it in 1930 to become state health commissioner for New York. He remained a PHS commissioned officer, but was loaned to the state at the request of Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In announcing the appointment, Governor Roosevelt said that in addition to his own immediate knowledge of Parran's qualifications and training, he had received endorsements of his choice from eminent physicians and health organizations. Roosevelt noted that:



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