Leonard Andrew Scheele (July 25, 1907 – January 8, 1993) was an American physician and public servant. He was appointed the seventh Surgeon General of the United States from 1948 to 1956. Life Early years Scheele was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. While in high school, he worked in his father's pharmacy and planned to enter medicine. For his undergraduate education, Scheele chose the University of Michigan (B.A., 1931) over Indiana University, citing the former's medical reputation. While at Michigan, he became a member of the Delta Chi fraternity. He ended up following his future spouse, then a dental student, to Detroit. He received his M.D. in 1934 from the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery (now the Wayne State University School of Medicine). Career 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 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, DC during 1936, Scheele came to the attention of then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr. and one of his top lieutenants, Joseph Walter 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 (1937–1939) in New York City at the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases (now the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center). On his return, Scheele served as officer-in-charge of the new National Cancer Control Program. He spent World War II on assignment to the military. Days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Scheele was dispatched to the Medical Division of the Federal Office of Civilian Defense, under New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. From 1943 through 1945 he was detailed to the Medical Department of the Army, where