Bion East

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Bion Rose East was an American professor, a public servant, and a public health pioneer. He was born on May 12, 1885 and died November 28, 1972.

1 Career
2 Political positions
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Career

Bion East received his D.D.S. at the University of Michigan in 1908. He was a frontline oral surgeon in World War I.

He was a pioneer in group practice and prepaid dental care, as well as an oral surgeon of distinction. But he looked beyond practice toward prevention. Because he knew how to develop and alliance among basic researchers, public health officials, and men of business, he is credited with a significant role in the nation-wide fortification of milk with Vitamin A and Vitamin D. This did not wipe out dental caries, nor did he think it would, but it did wipe out Rickets as a primary crippler of children.

He went on to investigate the epidemiology of dental caries. This led him to Columbia University where he began as Research Fellow in the then Delamar Institute of Public Health. He became Assistant Professor of Public Health Practice there, then Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dean of the School of Dental and Oral Surgery. There, and later as Assistant Chief Medical Director (for dentistry), Department of Medicine and Surgery of the Veterans Administration, he carried forward his fight for high standards of research, for attention to the basic sciences, and for greater opportunities for post-graduate dental education. He was especially proud to be Emeritus Professor of Dental Public Practice of Columbia University and to have been inducted into the Society of Sigma Xi--during the years Eisenhower was president of the university.

[edit] Political positions

He held passionate positions all his life, but he was human and courageous enough to change his mind. Long opposed to organized religion and in favor of free thinking, in the final years of his life he took great comfort from his Quaker connections. A staunch advocate of prohibition and an opponent of repeal, he said later he had been in error. A lifelong and almost evangelical Republican (see Eisenhower's response^[1] to a September 2, 1957 letter from East which was prompted by the "debacle" in the recent Wisconsin election, when voters selected a Democrat to fill the unexpired term of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy), he came to find larger loyalties than that of party. Long and unquestioning supporter of traditional American foreign policy who had volunteered in World War I, and who had borne his terrible personal loss in World War II with patriotic stoicism, he became an anti-militarist and an early advocate of total military withdrawal from Southeast Asia. His anguish over what he saw as the destruction of his America via its destruction of Vietnam pervaded his final years.