Medicine: New Surgeon General

Out of office last week after four years as surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service was Indiana’s Dr. Leroy E. Burney, 54, an able administrator but ^ man who made no pretense of being a New Frontiersman. In Burney’s office* sat Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, 49, whose keener interest in research and in care for the aged make him more acceptable to the Kennedy Administration.

To find Dr. Terry, the new Administration had to look no farther than PHS. Terry joined PHS as a young professor in preventive medicine in 1942, proved himself a first-class bedside doctor, became head of the medical service at its Baltimore hospital. In the National Heart Institute since 1950, Dr. Terry has headed the section investigating new treatments for heart disorders. In 1958 he took the No. 2 administrative post at NHI only on condition that he could still see patients, and teach at Johns Hopkins.

He was still making rounds when President Kennedy tapped him. The Senate has still to confirm his appointment, but that seems a cinch. Back in Red Level, Ala., his birthplace, Terry was named for a respected local doctor named Luther Leonidas Hill, whose son Lister is now Alabama’s senior Senator and chairman of the committee that passes on PHS appointments.

* While Burney put in a month as a special consultant to PHS, represented it at a W.H.O. conference in New Delhi (see FOREIGN NEWS).