Julius B. Richmond

Julius Richmond
Vice Admiral Julius Richmond, USPHS
12th Surgeon General of the United States
In office July 13, 1977 – May 14, 1981
President	Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan
Preceded by	S. Paul Ehrlich, Jr. (acting)
Succeeded by	Edward N. Brandt, Jr. (acting)
Personal details
Born	(1916-09-26)September 26, 1916 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	July 27, 2008(2008-07-27) (aged 91) Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, U.S.

Julius Benjamin Richmond (September 26, 1916 – July 27, 2008) was an American pediatrician and public health administrator. He was a vice admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and served as the United States Surgeon General and the United States Assistant Secretary for Health during the Carter Administration, from 1977 to 1981. Richmond is noted for his role in the creation of the Head Start program for disadvantaged children, serving as its first national director.

Richmond was born in Chicago He was educated during the Great Depression, earning his B.S. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by an M.S. in physiology and his M.D. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1939. After completing an 18-month rotating internship at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Richmond entered two pediatrics residencies, the first at Chicago’s Municipal Contagious Disease Hospital (1941–1942) and the second at Cook. The United States’ entry into World War II interrupted Richmond’s postgraduate training, as he volunteered and was inducted into the Army Air Corps in February 1942. Through 1946 Richmond worked as a flight surgeon with the Air Force’s Flying Training Command.

After demobilization, Richmond completed his residency and began what would be a distinguished academic career in which public service was an integral part of scholarly research. He began as a professor in Pediatrics at his alma mater (1946–53) and a Markle Foundation scholar in medical science (1948–53), and was active both in nonprofit children’s welfare organizations and Chicago’s Institute for Psychoanalysis. During 1953 he moved to the State University of New York at Syracuse College of Medicine (now known as the Upstate Medical Center). The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) inspired Richmond and his colleague, Betty Caldwell, to turn their interdisciplinary research, integrating elements of psychiatry into pediatrics, toward policy ends as they documented how poverty threatened the psychosocial development of young children. They focused on cognitive abilities developed during a child’s first years, where functional deficits linked to poverty, for example, those caused by malnutrition, could make learning more difficult and as a result, put the children of the poor at risk of failing both at school and later on, in attempts to advance economically.