R.I.P. -- C. Everett Koop

C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general who brought frank talk about AIDS into U.S. homes, has died at his home in Hanover, N.H., officials at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth said Monday. He was 96.

He spoke at Northwestern's graduation ceremonies in 1990; we got a good one.  He served in the Reagan administration in the fight against AIDS, and by all accounts, did the country a tremendous service.

Surgeon General Koop had an especially busy year in 1986:

"Dr. Koop will be remembered for his colossal contributions to the health and well-being of patients and communities in the U.S. and around the world," said a statement released by Chip Souba, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine and Joseph O'Donnell, senior scholar at the C. Everett Koop Institute. "As one of our country's greatest surgeons general, he effectively promoted health and the prevention of disease, thereby improving millions of lives in our nation and across the globe."

Koop may best remembered for his official 1986 report on AIDS – a plain-spoken 36-page document that talked about the way AIDS spread (through sex, needles and blood), the ways it did not spread (through casual contact in homes, schools and workplaces) and how people could protect themselves.

The report advocated condom use for the sexually active and sex education for schoolchildren, pleasantly surprising liberals and upsetting many of Koop's former supporters. An eight-page version was mailed to every American household in 1988.

The brochure came in a sealed packet with the warning that "some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly.In interviews and speeches, Koop always stressed that sexual abstinence and monogamy were the best protection against AIDS, but that medical experts had a duty to tell people who did not choose those paths how they could stay healthy.

"My position on AIDS was dictated by scientific integrity and Christian compassion," Koop wrote in his 1991 biography, Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor.

At one point, Koop was the second-most recognized public official in the United States, after President Reagan, says Alexandra Lord, a former Public Health Service historian and author of Condom Nation: The US Government's Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet. He was one of the most high-profile surgeons general, before or since, she says -- though she says people under age 35 or so may not know his name today.

In his time, "Koop was very effective," so much so that he made some subsequent administrations "very nervous" about the potential power of the men and women occupying the office, Lord says.

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At a time when AIDS was new, though, and the nation needed someone to give it the facts straight up, Koop filled the bill, says Woodie Kessel, a former assistant surgeon general who was a longtime friend and a Koop Institute fellow. "Every time there's a new threat to our well-being, it takes somebody to calm our fears... He worked to address those fears with facts, with science and with great compassion."

Fauci, who also became friends with Koop and worked with him on his AIDS report, says: "He was an amazing champion of treating it as a disease, not as a stigma. He understood it was a public health disaster in the making. ... I remember he would say, 'Tony, you do the science, I'll do the education for the public.'"

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said in a statement that when she took office, in 2010, "Dr. Koop sat down with me on what would become the first of numerous occasions to offer guidance and support. We often prayed together."