On Apr. 6, 1948, President Harry Truman appointed Leonard A. Scheele as U.S. Surgeon General. Scheele served as Surgeon General first under a Democratic President, Harry Truman, who appointed Scheele as Surgeon General Parran’s successor and 4 years later under a Republican, President Dwight Eisenhower, his former commander-in-chief during the war.

Dr. Scheele graduated at the height of the Great Depression. Inspired by one of his medical school professors, who taught preventive medicine and directed the laboratories at the Michigan State Health Department, Scheele followed up on a recruitment visit by Public Health Service (PHS) officers from Detroit’s Marine Hospital.

Encouraged by his school’s dean, he competed successfully for an internship at Chicago’s Marine Hospital (1933–1934). Once Dr. Scheele accepted a Commission as an Assistant Surgeon (July 2, 1934), he began a series of rotations at quarantine stations, in San Francisco and San Pedro, California and at Honolulu, Hawaii, where a light schedule of duties included inspecting aircraft at Pearl Harbor.

The New Deal and the National Cancer Act of 1937 transformed public health, and Scheele’s career. Reassigned to Washington, D.C. during 1936, Scheele came to the attention of then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran and one of his top lieutenants, Dr. Joseph Mountin, who choose Scheele to join a new Division of Public Health Methods. After a brief field assignment in public health administration (Acting County Health Officer, Queen Anne’s County, Maryland), Scheele was sent by Mountin for clinical training (1937-39) in New York City at the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases (now the Sloan-Kettering). On his return, Scheele served as officer-in-charge of the new National Cancer Control Program.

Scheele built on his wartime experience and carried on PHS’s leadership in international health, leading the U.S. delegations to the World Health Assembly (1949 through 1953) and serving twice as President of the World Health Organization.