Under Surgeon General William H. Stewart, 1965-1969, Dr. Gehrig was appointed deputy surgeon general of the Corps in 1966. He retired as a Rear Admiral in 1970.
Dr. Gehrig was born in Mapleton, Minnesota. He received bachelor's and medical degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1941 and 1945, respectively. He completed an internship at the County General Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was the acting director of tuberculosis control with the Alaska Department of Health before joining the Corps in 1945.
From 1947 to 1950, he was a resident in surgery at Overholt Thoracic Clinic in Boston. In 1951, he was chief of thoracic surgery at the Public Health Service (PHS) hospital at Staten Island, New York. In 1955, he became the deputy chief of surgery at the PHS hospital in Seattle.
From 1957 and for 4 years, he assumed the role of deputy chief of Division of Hospitals in Washington, DC. He was the first medical director of the U.S. Peace Corps before he was named the chief of the Bureau of Medical Services, in 1964.
As Deputy Surgeon General Gehrig, he emphasized communication in delivering a keynote address; the rules were the same from a physician to a patient as a teacher to a student and a computer to a computer. He defined the time-lag between research and application as a communication gap. He also stressed that better communication is important for scientist to know what colleagues are doing and to guide research, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1967.tb14338.x/abstract.
As acting surgeon general in 1967, he testified at a uranium mining radiation standards congressional hearing and projected that 529 miners may have died due to lung cancer and 98 lung cancer related deaths since 1963. 1n 1990, 25 years later, Congress finally passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, http://www.uvm.edu/~jdericks/pubs/Akwekon.pdf. Mining for radioactive material exposed countless individuals to radiation and left thousands of acres abandoned and unreclaimed from mines and tailings across the country, predominantly on tribal lands.
After his retirement from the Corps, Dr. Gehrig joined the American Hospital Association and was director of its Washington office when he retired in 1980. He was a diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and a member of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.
 |
 |
 |
HHS, Office of Public Health and Science |