Joseph Lister, Father of Modern Surgery

London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1947. First edition.

ASSOCIATION COPY: BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH LISTER PRESENTED BY SURGEON GENERAL LEROY BURNEY TO SENATOR JOSEPH LISTER HILL, CO-AUTHOR OF THE HILL-BURTON ACT.

8 inches tall hardcover, red cloth binding, inscribed in ink on front flyleaf, "May 27, 1960. To Senator Lister Hill with the highest personal regards, Lee Burney, Surgeon General." Frontis photograph of Lister, 270 pp, photographic plates, corners worn, cover edges and endpapers browned, otherwise very good without jacket.

RHODA TRUAX SILBERMAN (1901 – 2000), an American author. was a graduate of the Horace Mann School and Barnard College in New York. She wrote a number of biographies of historical physicians, the best known being The Doctors Warren of Boston, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1968.

LEROY EDGAR BURNEY (1906 - 1998) was appointed the eighth Surgeon General of the United States (1956 to 1961). Burney was born in Burney, Indiana, a town founded by his great-grandfather. He began premedical coursework at Butler University (1924-26) and completed both undergraduate and medical training at Indiana University (S.B., 1928; M.D., 1930). Initiation into the world of public health followed when Burney took advantage of a fellowship to study at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (M.S., 1931). His area of expertise would be public health administration at the state and local level, the front lines of public health. Surgeon General Burney applied his administrative know-how to steer PHS successfully through institutional growing pains as the agency responded to new and, at times, conflicting demands from the public, professional and voluntary advocacy groups, the parent Department, and the Congress. The key issues of the day were environmental health and access to health services, the former driven by widely shared alarm over deteriorating environmental conditions and fallout from the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the latter by expectations that national health insurance would soon be realized. Surgeon General Burney also refashioned his position to emphasize his role as a spokesperson on behalf of public health. In 1957 and again in 1959, he was the first Federal official to publicly identify cigarette smoke as a cause of lung cancer, issuing statements that paved the way for his successor, Surgeon General Luther L. Terry.

PROVENANCE: JOSEPH LISTER HILL (1894 - 1984) was a member of the Democratic Party, representing Alabama in the U.S. Congress for more than forty-five years, as both a U.S. Representative (1923-38) and a U.S. Senator (1938-69). During his Senate career, he was active on health-related issues and served as Senate Majority Whip (1941-47). Lister Hill was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of one of the South's most distinguished surgeons, Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill. He was named after Dr. Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery. A moderate Democrat, Senator Hill distinguished himself in a number of fields, but was best known for the Hospital and Health Center Construction Act of 1946, better known as the Hill-Burton Act. He also sponsored the Hill-Harris Act of 1963, providing for assistance in constructing facilities for the mentally retarded and mentally ill. Additionally, he was recognized as the most instrumental man in Congress in gaining greatly increased support for medical research at the nation's medical schools and other research institution. He sponsored other important legislation, including the [Rural Telephone Act, the Rural Housing Act, the Vocational Education Act, and the National Defense Education Act of 1958. In 1954, Hill signed "The Southern Manifesto" condemning the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs Board of Education ordering school desegregation (although he remained a close friend of Supreme Court Justice and fellow Alabamian Hugo Black, who voted with the entire court in support of Brown). In 1957, he voted against HR 6127, the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1969, Hill was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.