C. Everett Koop

C. Everett Koop (1980s)

Charles Everett Koop M.D. (October 14, 1916 – February 25, 2013) was an American physician. He served as the Surgeon General of the United States from 1982 to 1989, under Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Quotes

• I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes.
  • Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor (1993), p. 126.

• Each day of those early years in pediatric surgery I felt I was on the cutting edge. Some of the surgical problems that landed on the operating table at Children's had not even been named. Many of the operations I performed had never been done before. It was an exuberant feeling, but also a little scary. At times I was troubled by fears that I wasn't doing things the right way, that I would have regrets, or that someone else had performed a certain procedure successfully but had never bothered to write it up for the medical journals, or if they had I couldn't find it.
  • Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor (1993), p. 127.