No Politics in Virginia

Virginia politicians last week demanded of Virginia's Governor John Garland Pollard why he went out of the State to pick a successor for Virginia's first and only State Commissioner of Health, Dr. Ennion Gifford Williams who, 61, died last month. Governor Pollard usually is amiable. But continuous political pestering on this subject has put a chip on his shoulder. His thin lips snapped this retort:

"My task was to fill the vacancy by the appointment of a man whose training and experience gave the greatest promise for the protection of the health of the people of Virginia. The field of preventative medicine is a highly specialized one. There are tens of thousands of physicians trained to cure disease for every one trained to prevent its spread. Proven experts in this latter field are necessarily confined almost exclusively to officials in the health departments of National, State and municipal governments. The range of selection is therefore comparatively limited. Inasmuch as communicable disease is no respecter of State or party lines I felt that I had a right to look the country over and appoint the very best man available. That man I found to be Dr. Warren F. Draper, Assistant Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service, and on the unanimous recommendation of our State Board of Health I have appointed him. President Hoover has consented to Dr. Draper's acceptance, thus recognizing that the health of the Nation is the sum total of the health of the States. The appointment has brought criticism from partisan sources. But I will not 'play politics' with the public health."

Dr. Warren Fales Draper, 47, knows Virginia's health conditions as well as any one in the State. He lives at Cherrydale. During the War, as assistant surgeon in the Health Service, he had charge of extra-cantonment sanitation at Petersburg and Newport News. After the War, the late Commissioner Williams borrowed him to help develop rural sanitation in Virginia counties.

In 1922 Dr. Draper became Assistant Surgeon General in charge of the Health Service's co-operative services with State and local health authorities. He has worked in New England and Pennsylvania, as well as in Virginia. Governor Pollard had no trouble obtaining his services for Virginia. Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming of the U. S. Public Health Service is also a Virginian, and such an assignment was not without precedent. Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., another Assistant Surgeon General, has been New York State's Health Commissioner the past year, at request of Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the past, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Hawaii, Milwaukee, Chicago, also Peru, Ecuador* and other foreign countries, have similarly gone to the Government for medical help.

*Drs. John D. Long and Clifford Rush Eskey of the Service have just wiped bubonic plague from Peru & Ecuador by killing 4,400,000 rats in two years.

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