On Mar. 3, 1920, Hugh Smith Cumming was appointed U.S. Surgeon General.  Cumming retired as Surgeon General and from active duty in the Public Health Service  on January 31, 1936. He continued to serve as Director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau until 1947.

An unfortunate legacy of Cumming’s tenure was the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, begun in 1930 and continued under Cumming’s successors. This study of untreated syphilis in African-American males was eventually declared unethical and finally halted in 1973.