1892-1968
The Natiom's Family Doctor and Crusader Against the Last Great Plague

A Censored Broadcast.

In November 1934 the Columbia Broadcasting Company scheduled a radio address by New York State Health Commissioner Thomas Parran Jr. on future goals for public health. But he never delivered his talk. Listeners who tuned in heard piano melodies instead. Moments before he was scheduled to go on the air, CBS told him that he could not mention syphilis and gonorrhea by name. In response, Parran refused to go on and complained in a press release that his speech should have been considered more acceptable than "the veiled obscenity permitted by Columbia in the vaudeville acts of some of their commercial programs." During Roosevelt's New Deal, Parran, as the surgeon general of the United States, committed the nation to the eradication of venereal disease by dramatically bringing these infections to the center...