Warren Fales Draper (August 9, 1883 – March 19, 1970) was Assistant Surgeon General and later Deputy Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1910, Draper entered the Public Health Service, completing a two-year tour on the west coast followed by assignments near Washington D.C. During World War I he was commissioned by the U. S. Army as a sanitation officer, working at Camp Lee and Newport News, both in Virginia, and then conducting relief activities during influenza outbreaks in New England and Pennsylvania. Draper returned to the Public Health Service in 1919, and in 1922 was promoted to assistant surgeon general ahead of his peers. When the Virginia State Commissioner of Health died in 1931, the state's governor borrowed Draper to fill the position, which he did for three years. Five years after once again returning to the Public Health Service, in 1939, Draper was appointed as the Deputy Surgeon General, which position he held until his retirement.
During World War II, Draper was brought into the United States Army with the rank of brigadier general, and served in Europe under General Dwight D. Eisenhower as a member of the Civil Affairs Branch of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Put in charge of the Public Health division, he was quickly promoted to major general, and received recognition for his work with the vexing public health issues created by the war, and their impact on the ability of the Allies to fight. Dr. Draper returned to the Public Health Service after the war, and retired from that organization in 1947.
Shortly after his retirement he became the assistant vice president for health services for the American Red Cross, but in 1948 was named the executive medical officer for the United Mine Workers (UMW) Welfare and Retirement Fund. Under his supervision, the fund created ten union-operated hospitals in coal mining regions of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. His two-decade tenure with this program brought him recognition and awards from the medical community. He retired from this position with the UMW in September 1969, but continued with the union as the special assistant in the newly formed UMW Department of Occupational Health until his death in 1970.
Draper was influential in many professional organizations and was the president of several of them. He lectured at a number of medical schools, authored 61 articles on public health and preventive medicine, and co-authored several books and pamphlets. His humanity, humor, compassion and warmth of character are evident in many of his writings, and in the words of those who knew him.
Ancestry and early life Draper was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 9, 1883, the son of William Burgess Draper (May 16, 1852 – March 11, 1939) and Carrie Marie Drew (October 3, 1856 – February 8, 1924). His father was a businessman and somewhat of an inventor who became financially independent when he divided a property he owned in Boston and sold it off as house lots. His grandfather, Daniel Fisher Draper (1822–1874), was a dentist who had a successful practice in Cambridge until chronic poor lung health resulted in his premature death. Draper had one sibling, his younger brother Elwyn Burgess Draper who, after serving in the United States Navy during World War I, was a career businessman.
Draper was named for his grandfather's oldest brother, the first Warren Fales Draper (1818–1905), who flourished in the publishing business in Andover, Massachusetts, for nearly fifty years. Being successful in his trade, and having no children, the earlier Warren Draper made substantial gifts to his church and local schools and provided scholarships to aspiring students. The family descends from James Draper, known as "James the Puritan" who emigrated from Yorkshire, England, to Roxbury, Massachusetts, shortly after 1647.
As children, Draper and his younger brother Elwyn grew up in Cambridge, and later moved to Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. Draper spent his summers working on a farm near Liberty, Maine, belonging to friends of his parents, where he earned no money, but learned the value of hard work. He attended Newton High School for two years, but wanted to go to college with two of his very close friends who were a year ahead of him. In order to graduate a year ahead of schedule, he took some summer courses and then completed his high school requirements in a single year at Waban School for Boys where he also participated in a variety of sports. In 1902 he graduated from high school, and later that year began his studies at Amherst College. Draper was attracted to Amherst because he was provided a scholarship covering tuition costs from his namesake who had graduated from there in 1848. Draper thought Amherst to be an exceptional school, but considered himself a mediocre student because of his other wide-ranging interests, such as attending fraternity parties, skating, and canoeing, usually with his future wife who was in the same year class at Smith College. Draper had wanted to be a medical doctor since he was a youngster, and upon graduating from Amherst in 1906, he began his studies at Harvard Medical School.
During his first two years of medical school Draper lived at home, but for his final two years he and a roommate rented a place near the school and hospital. Shortly before his graduation he was married in Detroit, Michigan on April 6, 1910, to Margaret Gansevoort Maxon (October 29, 1883 – April 28, 1967), the daughter of William D. and Anna (Lush) Maxon of Detroit, but originally from Waterford, New York. Margaret had attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics. A month after his marriage, Draper earned his MD degree, then went to Washington, D.C., to take the United States Public Health Service entrance exam. In June, he and Margaret went to a summer cottage in Morrisville, Vermont, awaiting the exam results and news of his first assignment.
Years in the Public Health Service
West Coast duty Draper finished second on the Public Health Service exam, out of about 25 examinees, and in August 1910 reported to his first assignment at the quarantine station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Having seldom been far from their homes, Draper and his wife traveled the scenic route to the West Coast by taking the Canadian Pacific Railway over the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver, followed by a boat trip to Seattle, and then another train to San Francisco.
Work at the quarantine station involved meeting and boarding ships arriving from Asia, and inspecting all of the passengers for plague, yellow fever, small pox, typhus, and leprosy. If any individuals were suspected of having any of these diseases, they were taken to the station for quarantine. If an active case of small pox was found, then the entire passenger and crew population of the ship was put into quarantine.
In April 1911 Draper received orders for a tour as Ship's Surgeon on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service cutter Bear, which assignment would last until Thanksgiving. Still being a newlywed, Draper was distraught over the pending separation from his wife and began questioning his suitability to the Public Health Service. He considered getting out of the service then, but could not financially withstand being without a job. He and his wife decided to visit the ship and had lunch with the crew members who were very kind to the couple. Following this, Margaret told Draper he should do the tour, and that she would be fine. Draper was still unsure of his suitability to the health service, and before sailing he had a talk with the regional Public Health Service representative in San Francisco, Dr. Rupert Blue. Dr. Blue was very understanding and told Draper to see him when his ship tour was over.
Once underway, Bear followed the West Coast of the United States from San Diego, California, to Point Barrow, Alaska. Draper was able to make home visits to ailing Iñupiat in many villages on the ship's ports of call. Upon completion of the tour, he became the resident physician at San Francisco Immigration Hospital. He was not able to revisit Dr. Blue, who had since left to become the Surgeon General following the death of Dr. Walter Wyman. Blue had not forgotten Draper, however, and made arrangements for him to attend a "refresher course" at the Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., assignments Early in September 1912, Draper and his wife moved back east to Washington, D.C. Draper was one of about eight young medical officers selected for the refresher course at the Hygienic Laboratory, forerunner of the National Institutes of Health. Students who were successful in the course and showed an aptitude for research could spend several years or even a career doing scientific research. This appealed to Draper at this point in his life since he had just spent two years traveling extensively, and with a pregnant wife he liked the prospect of settling down in one place for a while. However, this assignment would be short-lived for Draper, for a reason best put into his own words:
There was in the laboratory a large tank of good-sized turtles being used experimentally to test the claims of a commercially minded enthusiast who wanted to market a turtle vaccine to immunize humans against tuberculosis. On rather a dull afternoon my gaze somehow wandered to this turtle cage and I thought what fun it would be to organize a turtle race, whip up some betting and try to make some money. I sold the idea to other members of the class and soon we had chalk lanes mapped out on the floor, a turtle with a number on its back assigned to each member, and were down on our knees, snapping our fingers, and exhorting our respective turtles to hurry up and win the race.
As events transpired, the laboratory director walked in, received a confession from the instigator, and following a short office visit let Draper know that he did not have the spirit for scientific research, and would not be going into that field. While Draper thought this a tragedy at the time, he later looked at it as a great turning point in his career, freeing him for work that would eventually bring him prominence in his profession. Draper was allowed to finish the course, after which one of his older classmates, Dr. Hugh Cumming, was put in charge of a scientific study of shellfish and water pollution. Cumming then put Draper in charge of a small laboratory in Colonial Beach, Virginia, where he spent the next year studying the bacteriological contamination of oysters in the Potomac River. Since both Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, dumped their raw sewage into the river, Draper was to answer the question of whether oysters were affected 68 miles downstream. He discovered that the pollution had been neutralized by natural processes much further upstream, and thus had no effect where he ran most of his tests. The study was important to ease fears that pollution might be affecting the extensive oyster beds near Point Lookout, Maryland, much further downstream.
Following his year at Colonial Beach, Draper returned to the headquarters of the Public Health Service in Washington, D.C., and became the assistant to the Chief of Scientific Research., Dr. John W. Kerr, in the Surgeon General's office. Here he helped in the administration of scientific research programs and the Hygienic Laboratory. During this time, Draper participated in a study in Fulton County, Georgia, designed to both improve the living conditions of convicts while simultaneously reducing the per capita cost of maintaining them. He co-authored a pamphlet on this study published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1918.
World War I