Leroy Edgar Burney (December 31, 1906 – July 31, 1998) was an American physician and public health official. He was appointed the eighth Surgeon General of the United States from 1956 to 1961. Biography Early years 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). An introduction to the Public Health Service (PHS) came through a one-year internship at the Chicago Marine Hospital. 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). Courtesy of the renowned epidemiologist Dr. W. H. Frost and the Rockefeller Foundation, Burney was allowed to extend his studies for six months of field work at the Joint Health Department of Charlottesville, Virginia, immunizing preschool children against diphtheria. Career From Charlottesville, Burney applied for and was accepted into the PHS Regular Corps as an Assistant Surgeon (1932). His area of expertise would be public health administration at the state and local level, the front lines of public health. Like many of his generation at PHS, Burney came up through the ranks of then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr.’s venereal disease control programs, receiving specialized training at the New York Marine Hospital (1934) and assisting in the management of rapid treatment centers around the country. Burney helped establish the first PHS mobile venereal disease clinic, in Brunswick, Georgia (1937–39), bringing access to treatment for African Americans, whom Jim Crow segregation excluded from the predominantly white locations of other facilities. Burney spent most of World War II stateside, where he served as Assistant Chief of PHS's Division of State Relations (1943–44), except for a five-month detail to the Navy, where he traveled to the Mediterranean on behalf of the War Shipping Administration, to address infectious disease problems affecting ports. After the war, Burney continued his work with state and county health departments, directing PHS's New Orleans district office (1945) and then accepting a detail to be State Health Commissioner and Secretary of Indiana's new State Board of Health (1945–54) and teach at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In 1954 Burney returned to PHS as an Assistant Surgeon General and Deputy Chief of the Bureau of State Services, overseeing grants-in-aid to the states while being