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Thursday, August 07, 2014 7:47:19 PM
Jesse L. Steinfeld, Surgeon General and Tobacco Foe, Dies at 87
By WILLIAM YARDLEYAUG. 6, 2014
Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, who as surgeon general in the Nixon administration spoke out against cigarette smoking, bringing new attention to the risks it posed to women and to people exposed to secondhand smoke, died on Tuesday in Pomona, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Susan Steinfeld said.
Dr. Steinfeld had been a top official at the National Cancer Institute under President Lyndon B. Johnson before President Richard M. Nixon named him surgeon general in December 1969. He soon developed a contentious relationship with the tobacco industry, which lobbied for his dismissal.
Along with many other top administration officials, he was asked to submit his resignation after Nixon’s re-election in November 1972. He later said that he had not expected the resignation to be accepted, but it was. Nixon did not appoint a permanent successor.
Dr. Steinfeld said he believed he lost the job because of his efforts to reduce smoking and his concerns about violence on television.
He arrived in office amid increasing attention to smoking as a public health issue.
Beginning in 1965, after a report by a previous surgeon general, Luther L. Terry, cigarette packs were required to bear labels saying, “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.” In 1970, under a bill initially proposed during the Johnson administration, the labels were strengthened to say, “Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”
The surgeon general’s office had been required to issue reports about smoking since the mid-1960s. But with increasing evidence that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases, Dr. Steinfeld made the issue his own and his office a bully pulpit.
Citing new studies showing that women were less likely than men to quit smoking, he helped lead a campaign to reduce the number of female smokers. He spoke out against how tobacco companies marketed cigarettes to women and warned that smoking could be dangerous to women’s health and to the health of their children, born or unborn. He said smoking ruined teeth and caused wrinkles.
“I am puzzled by women’s attitudes toward smoking, the tenacity with which they cling to this habit despite the compelling health and aesthetic reasons there are for quitting,” he said in 1972.
Dr. Steinfeld was among the first public health officials to warn of secondhand smoke. When he became surgeon general, he removed ashtrays from his office (his two predecessors smoked) and put up signs that read, “Thank you for not smoking.”
Some of his ideas, including bans on smoking in restaurants, airplanes, trains and other public places, did not take hold for decades. His boldness gave momentum to activists who opposed smoking and sought similar restrictions.
Industry critics accused him of lying.
“The results of public misinformation are evident,” David S. Peoples, the president of the tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds, wrote in a letter to Elliot Richardson, the secretary of health, education and welfare in 1972. “Public transportation, for example (including the open-decked Staten Island Ferry), is beset with no-smoking policies on the basis of the surgeon general’s arbitrary campaign to ban all smoking.”
Jesse Leonard Steinfeld was born on Jan. 6, 1927, in West Aliquippa, Pa., near Pittsburgh. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father, a smoker, died when he was 5 years old. His mother ran a dry goods and hardware store.
He finished high school at 16 and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh 19 months later. He was 22 when he received his medical degree from what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
He studied oncology during a residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and later taught medicine there. In 1954, he moved to the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He returned to California in the late 1950s to teach and do research at the University of Southern California but moved back to the Washington area in 1968 to work again at the cancer institute. Later that year he was appointed deputy assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs.
Organizational changes in 1968 left the surgeon general without a clear line of authority — the position had previously supervised the Public Health Service — and some sought to abolish the office altogether. But the title had a high profile and respect on Capitol Hill, and Dr. Steinfeld embraced the role of a public figure. In addition to his antismoking activism, he spoke frequently against what he regarded as the negative effects of television violence on children.
He later held several teaching and administrative positions at medical schools and hospitals. He was director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Rochester, Minn., in the mid-1970s before moving to California to teach at the University of California, Irvine. He also served as chief of medicine at the V.A. hospital in Long Beach.
He was later the dean of the school of medicine of the Medical College of Virginia and president of the Medical College of Georgia.
Besides his daughter Susan, his survivors include his wife of more than 61 years, the former Gen Stokes; two other daughters, Dr. Mary Beth Steinfeld and Jody Stefansson; and two grandchildren.
A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2014, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Jesse L. Steinfeld, 87, Surgeon General and Tobacco Foe, Dies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/us/jesse-l-steinfeld-surgeon-general-and-tobacco-foe-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
====================================================================
DR. LUTHER L. TERRY, 73, IS DEAD; WARNED PUBLIC OF CIGARETTE PERIL
By ERIC PACE
Published: March 31, 1985
Dr. Luther L. Terry, who as Surgeon General of the United States was instrumental in preparing a 1964 report that said cigarette smoking contributed so substantially to the death rate that ''appropriate remedial action'' was called for, died Friday in Philadelphia, where he had lived for 20 years. He was 73 years old.
Family members said Dr. Terry died at Pennsylvania Hospital after suffering a heart attack.
The report, which did much to discourage Americans from smoking and helped lead to a variety of measures to curb the adverse effects of smoking, was prepared, at President Kennedy's initiative, to help the Government determine what to do about the issue.
The report was prepared by a committee of 10 prominent scientists led by Dr. Terry, a former cigarette smoker who had switched to a pipe by the time the report came out. Dr. James M. Hundley, the Assistant Surgeon General, was vice chairman, and Dr. Eugene H. Guthrie, chief of the Division of Chronic Diseases in the Public Health Service, was the staff director.
A Problem of 'National Concern'
The panel began its work in mid-1962, assessing and organizing thousands of documents on earlier studies concerning the relationship of smoking and health; it did not do original research. The 387-page study, which was 14 months in preparation, contained roughly 150,000 words.
Dr. Terry, a soft-spoken, Alabama- born physician, said at a news conference in Washington on Jan. 11, 1964, when the report was made public, that the problem of cigarette smoking was one of ''national concern.''
The report concluded that there was no question as to the role of cigarette smoking in causing lung cancer. It said the death rate from lung cancer, the most frequent form of cancer in men, was almost 1,000 percent higher in men who smokeed cigarettes than it was in nonsmokers.
The report said cigarette smoking was the ''most important'' cause of chronic bronchitis and increased the risk of death from that disease and from emphysema. The report also said that in cases of coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, mortality was 70 percent higher for cigarette smokers than for nonsmokers.
A Blow to the Tobacco Industry
The committee made no specific recommendations for action, but its report was seen at the time as dealing a heavy blow to efforts mounted in previous years by the tobacco industry in defense of cigarette smoking.
The report dismissed arguments questioning the validity of earlier studies, but the Tobacco Institute, an industry group, rejected the study, contending that it was not the final word on smoking and health.
For the rest of his career, Dr. Terry remained largely concerned with the dangers of cigarette smoking. After serving as Surgeon General from 1961 to 1965, he declared in 1967, when he was chairman of the National Interagency Council on Smoking and Health: ''The period of uncertainty is over. There is no longer any doubt that cigarette smoking is a direct threat to the user's health. There was a time when we wpoke of the smoking and health 'controversy.' To my mind, the days of argument are over.''
''Today we are on the threshhold of a new era,'' he went on, ''a time of action, a time for public and priate asgencies, community groups and individual citizens to work together to bring his hydra-haded monster under control.''
19 Million Quit Smoking
By then, Dr. Daniel Horn, director of the National Clearinghouse on Smoking and Health, said 19 million Americans had quit smoking, but almost 50 million other Americans continued to smoke and more than a million young people began smoking each year.
Luther Leonidas Terry was born in Red Level, a small town in southern Alabama, on Sept. 15, 1911, the son of James Edward Terry and Lula M. Durham Terry. He earned a bachelor of science degree from Birmingham- Southern College in 1931 and an M.D. from Tulane University in 1935.
After a succession of medical teaching and research posts, he was called to active duty in the Public Health Service in 1942, and became chief of medical service in 1943 at what was then the United States Marine Hospital in Baltimore, a post he held for almost a decade while also teaching and doing some reaearch at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1944, Dr. Terry became a member of the Regular Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service. In 1953, he became a full-time medical researcher with he National Heart Institute, becoming assistant director in 1958 and concentrating on the problem of hypertension.
Concern for the Workplace
He was named Surgeon General in 1961 and remained in that post until 1965, when he became vice president for medical affairs and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired as a professor in 1982.
In his last years, one of Dr. Terry's chief medical interests was cigarette smoking in the workplace. In public appearances around the country, he argued that companies should take steps to prevent nonsmoking employees from being exposed to cigarette smoke.
Over the years, he was awarded 17 honorary degrees.
Dr. Terry is survived by his wife, Janet Reynolds Terry, whom he married in 1940; two sons, Luther L. Terry Jr. of Singapore and Michael Durham Terry of Old Greenwich, Conn.; a daughter, Jan Terry Kollock of Philadelphia; a brother, Durham Terry of Red Level, a sister, Elizabeth Terry White of Charlotte, N.C., and three grandchildren.
Michael Terry said Friday that his father would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but funeral and burial arrangements were not yet complete.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/31/us/dr-luther-l-terry-73-is-dead-warned-public-of-cigarette-peril.html
By WILLIAM YARDLEYAUG. 6, 2014
Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, who as surgeon general in the Nixon administration spoke out against cigarette smoking, bringing new attention to the risks it posed to women and to people exposed to secondhand smoke, died on Tuesday in Pomona, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Susan Steinfeld said.
Dr. Steinfeld had been a top official at the National Cancer Institute under President Lyndon B. Johnson before President Richard M. Nixon named him surgeon general in December 1969. He soon developed a contentious relationship with the tobacco industry, which lobbied for his dismissal.
Along with many other top administration officials, he was asked to submit his resignation after Nixon’s re-election in November 1972. He later said that he had not expected the resignation to be accepted, but it was. Nixon did not appoint a permanent successor.
Dr. Steinfeld said he believed he lost the job because of his efforts to reduce smoking and his concerns about violence on television.
He arrived in office amid increasing attention to smoking as a public health issue.
Beginning in 1965, after a report by a previous surgeon general, Luther L. Terry, cigarette packs were required to bear labels saying, “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.” In 1970, under a bill initially proposed during the Johnson administration, the labels were strengthened to say, “Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”
The surgeon general’s office had been required to issue reports about smoking since the mid-1960s. But with increasing evidence that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases, Dr. Steinfeld made the issue his own and his office a bully pulpit.
Citing new studies showing that women were less likely than men to quit smoking, he helped lead a campaign to reduce the number of female smokers. He spoke out against how tobacco companies marketed cigarettes to women and warned that smoking could be dangerous to women’s health and to the health of their children, born or unborn. He said smoking ruined teeth and caused wrinkles.
“I am puzzled by women’s attitudes toward smoking, the tenacity with which they cling to this habit despite the compelling health and aesthetic reasons there are for quitting,” he said in 1972.
Dr. Steinfeld was among the first public health officials to warn of secondhand smoke. When he became surgeon general, he removed ashtrays from his office (his two predecessors smoked) and put up signs that read, “Thank you for not smoking.”
Some of his ideas, including bans on smoking in restaurants, airplanes, trains and other public places, did not take hold for decades. His boldness gave momentum to activists who opposed smoking and sought similar restrictions.
Industry critics accused him of lying.
“The results of public misinformation are evident,” David S. Peoples, the president of the tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds, wrote in a letter to Elliot Richardson, the secretary of health, education and welfare in 1972. “Public transportation, for example (including the open-decked Staten Island Ferry), is beset with no-smoking policies on the basis of the surgeon general’s arbitrary campaign to ban all smoking.”
Jesse Leonard Steinfeld was born on Jan. 6, 1927, in West Aliquippa, Pa., near Pittsburgh. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father, a smoker, died when he was 5 years old. His mother ran a dry goods and hardware store.
He finished high school at 16 and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh 19 months later. He was 22 when he received his medical degree from what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
He studied oncology during a residency at the University of California, San Francisco, and later taught medicine there. In 1954, he moved to the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He returned to California in the late 1950s to teach and do research at the University of Southern California but moved back to the Washington area in 1968 to work again at the cancer institute. Later that year he was appointed deputy assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs.
Organizational changes in 1968 left the surgeon general without a clear line of authority — the position had previously supervised the Public Health Service — and some sought to abolish the office altogether. But the title had a high profile and respect on Capitol Hill, and Dr. Steinfeld embraced the role of a public figure. In addition to his antismoking activism, he spoke frequently against what he regarded as the negative effects of television violence on children.
He later held several teaching and administrative positions at medical schools and hospitals. He was director of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Rochester, Minn., in the mid-1970s before moving to California to teach at the University of California, Irvine. He also served as chief of medicine at the V.A. hospital in Long Beach.
He was later the dean of the school of medicine of the Medical College of Virginia and president of the Medical College of Georgia.
Besides his daughter Susan, his survivors include his wife of more than 61 years, the former Gen Stokes; two other daughters, Dr. Mary Beth Steinfeld and Jody Stefansson; and two grandchildren.
A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2014, on page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Jesse L. Steinfeld, 87, Surgeon General and Tobacco Foe, Dies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/us/jesse-l-steinfeld-surgeon-general-and-tobacco-foe-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
====================================================================
DR. LUTHER L. TERRY, 73, IS DEAD; WARNED PUBLIC OF CIGARETTE PERIL
By ERIC PACE
Published: March 31, 1985
Dr. Luther L. Terry, who as Surgeon General of the United States was instrumental in preparing a 1964 report that said cigarette smoking contributed so substantially to the death rate that ''appropriate remedial action'' was called for, died Friday in Philadelphia, where he had lived for 20 years. He was 73 years old.
Family members said Dr. Terry died at Pennsylvania Hospital after suffering a heart attack.
The report, which did much to discourage Americans from smoking and helped lead to a variety of measures to curb the adverse effects of smoking, was prepared, at President Kennedy's initiative, to help the Government determine what to do about the issue.
The report was prepared by a committee of 10 prominent scientists led by Dr. Terry, a former cigarette smoker who had switched to a pipe by the time the report came out. Dr. James M. Hundley, the Assistant Surgeon General, was vice chairman, and Dr. Eugene H. Guthrie, chief of the Division of Chronic Diseases in the Public Health Service, was the staff director.
A Problem of 'National Concern'
The panel began its work in mid-1962, assessing and organizing thousands of documents on earlier studies concerning the relationship of smoking and health; it did not do original research. The 387-page study, which was 14 months in preparation, contained roughly 150,000 words.
Dr. Terry, a soft-spoken, Alabama- born physician, said at a news conference in Washington on Jan. 11, 1964, when the report was made public, that the problem of cigarette smoking was one of ''national concern.''
The report concluded that there was no question as to the role of cigarette smoking in causing lung cancer. It said the death rate from lung cancer, the most frequent form of cancer in men, was almost 1,000 percent higher in men who smokeed cigarettes than it was in nonsmokers.
The report said cigarette smoking was the ''most important'' cause of chronic bronchitis and increased the risk of death from that disease and from emphysema. The report also said that in cases of coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, mortality was 70 percent higher for cigarette smokers than for nonsmokers.
A Blow to the Tobacco Industry
The committee made no specific recommendations for action, but its report was seen at the time as dealing a heavy blow to efforts mounted in previous years by the tobacco industry in defense of cigarette smoking.
The report dismissed arguments questioning the validity of earlier studies, but the Tobacco Institute, an industry group, rejected the study, contending that it was not the final word on smoking and health.
For the rest of his career, Dr. Terry remained largely concerned with the dangers of cigarette smoking. After serving as Surgeon General from 1961 to 1965, he declared in 1967, when he was chairman of the National Interagency Council on Smoking and Health: ''The period of uncertainty is over. There is no longer any doubt that cigarette smoking is a direct threat to the user's health. There was a time when we wpoke of the smoking and health 'controversy.' To my mind, the days of argument are over.''
''Today we are on the threshhold of a new era,'' he went on, ''a time of action, a time for public and priate asgencies, community groups and individual citizens to work together to bring his hydra-haded monster under control.''
19 Million Quit Smoking
By then, Dr. Daniel Horn, director of the National Clearinghouse on Smoking and Health, said 19 million Americans had quit smoking, but almost 50 million other Americans continued to smoke and more than a million young people began smoking each year.
Luther Leonidas Terry was born in Red Level, a small town in southern Alabama, on Sept. 15, 1911, the son of James Edward Terry and Lula M. Durham Terry. He earned a bachelor of science degree from Birmingham- Southern College in 1931 and an M.D. from Tulane University in 1935.
After a succession of medical teaching and research posts, he was called to active duty in the Public Health Service in 1942, and became chief of medical service in 1943 at what was then the United States Marine Hospital in Baltimore, a post he held for almost a decade while also teaching and doing some reaearch at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1944, Dr. Terry became a member of the Regular Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service. In 1953, he became a full-time medical researcher with he National Heart Institute, becoming assistant director in 1958 and concentrating on the problem of hypertension.
Concern for the Workplace
He was named Surgeon General in 1961 and remained in that post until 1965, when he became vice president for medical affairs and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired as a professor in 1982.
In his last years, one of Dr. Terry's chief medical interests was cigarette smoking in the workplace. In public appearances around the country, he argued that companies should take steps to prevent nonsmoking employees from being exposed to cigarette smoke.
Over the years, he was awarded 17 honorary degrees.
Dr. Terry is survived by his wife, Janet Reynolds Terry, whom he married in 1940; two sons, Luther L. Terry Jr. of Singapore and Michael Durham Terry of Old Greenwich, Conn.; a daughter, Jan Terry Kollock of Philadelphia; a brother, Durham Terry of Red Level, a sister, Elizabeth Terry White of Charlotte, N.C., and three grandchildren.
Michael Terry said Friday that his father would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but funeral and burial arrangements were not yet complete.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/31/us/dr-luther-l-terry-73-is-dead-warned-public-of-cigarette-peril.html
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