Leroy Burney

(Dec. 31, 1906–July 31, 1998). Leroy Burney was responsible for major advances in environmental health, chronic disease, aging, education, research, and international health.

Born in Burney, Indiana, Decatur County, Burney came from Scotch-Irish pioneers. From these humble beginnings, his life’s journey would carry him to the pinnacles of government service in public health. Attending grammar school in Burney, Indiana, he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. He began his college career at Butler University but graduated from Indiana University in 1928 and the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1930.

After he received his degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1931, Burney joined the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) as an assistant surgeon. Between 1945 and 1954, he served as commissioner of the Indiana State Board of Health, where he directed the Indiana field trials of the Salk polio vaccine.

In 1954, he returned to the USPHS. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him U.S. surgeon general in August 1956, a position he held until January 1961. As U.S. surgeon general, Burney met America’s health challenges, the polio epidemic, the threat of Asian flu and preparation of flu vaccine, the problems of air and water pollution, and aging and chronic diseases. His innovative reforms shaped health policy under presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Burney’s legacies include the creation of the National Library of Medicine, a major expansion of the National Institutes of Health budget, and, in 1957, the first USPHS announcement of the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. When Burney served as president of the tenth World Health Assembly in Geneva in 1958, Eisenhower called his work to relieve human suffering the noblest cause of all.