PMID: 8801649

Issn Print: 0148-5717

Publication Date: 1996/01/01


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The History of Nongonococcal Urethritis: Thomas Parran Award Lecture

DAVID TAYLOR-ROBINSON

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Excerpt

IT IS A GREAT HONOR to be invited to New Orleans to receive the Thomas Parran Award of the American Venereal Disease Association. I am particularly appreciative because I am not a native of the United States, although I have made many visits and spent sabbatical periods in this country. Indeed, it is here in the 1960s that I first began to work on sexually transmitted organisms and, in an indirect way, on nongonococcal urethritis (NGU), a subject pursued ever since and, hence, the reason for my discussion of the disease.
Thomas Parran, who lived from 1892 to 1968, was an epidemiologist who joined the United States Public Health Service in 1917 and was Surgeon General of this organization from 1936 to 1948. It was his dedicated efforts that were instrumental in bringing about the control of syphilis in the United States which, after the first World War and in the 1920s and 1930s, had escalated to become a major public health problem. In comparison, NGU paled into insignificance, although during the lifetime of Thomas Parran there were a number of landmark events in our understanding of this disease.

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