he earned the rank of lieutenant colonel and specialized in health-related governance in occupied territories. Following service in Italy and Africa, Scheele arrived in London in early 1944, where he led the Preventive Medicine Section of the Public Health Branch, Medical Division of the G-5 Division at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Scheele closed out the war as director of the Health, Welfare, Education and Religion Division of the Allied Control Council in Berlin and received the U.S. Typhus Medal for his work in Germany. Surgeon General After the war, Scheele moved quickly up the ranks to Surgeon General. Promoted to surgeon and appointed assistant chief of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (1946), he oversaw a new program of grants-in-aid to the states for cancer control work in the areas of biology, biochemistry, biophysics, chemotherapy, epidemiology, and pathology. Scheele's skilled diplomacy before the United States Congress in the spring of 1947 netted the National Institute of Health (NIH) a fourteenfold increase in budget appropriation. He was elevated to director of NCI and associate director of NIH (1947), the latter a position created for him. Scheele served as surgeon general first under a Democratic President, Harry S. Truman, who appointed Scheele as Surgeon General Parran's successor on April 6, 1948, and 4 years later under a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, his former commander during the war. 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. But the domestic scene occupied the lion's share of his energies. Together with the philanthropists Albert and Mary Lasker and voluntary health organizations like the American Cancer Society, Scheele worked closely with enthusiastic supporters in Congress to bring biomedical research fully into the fold of public health practice. NCI provided a working model, and a categorical approach organized about specific diseases became the means. Legislation enacted during 1948 made NIH into a plural "Institutes" by adding a National Heart Institute, the National Institute of Dental Research, the National Microbiological Institute (predecessor to the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Institute), and the National Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine (renamed the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases in 1950), followed by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (1950) and a 500-bed Clinical Center to