Simmons Advocates Adoption of National Emergency Health Plan

A preventative medicine program financed by federal funds, could become one of the most powerful weapons for the nation's defense, Dean Simmons of the School of Public Health asserted last night in a guest lecture before the College of Physicians in Philadelphia.

This emergency program would be "aimed directly at the conservation of the health and strength of the country's most important resource--its fighting and working manpower," he said.

Simmons, Chief of Preventative Medicine for the Army in the last war, said that one way to fixed responsibility for the nation's health would be to create an emergency federal Department of Health with cabinet status and headed by a Secretary of Health "who is a physician trained in public health and whose abilities and vision are recognized by real leaders of the professions of medicine and public health."