Who was Dr. C. Everett Coop? And why is his life so significant? How did he become so passionate about abortion?

And how did he navigate bioethical controversies during his tenure as Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan?

We'll discuss these questions in a whole lot of moment with our guest and Dr. Coop's biographer and medical historian, Dr. Nigel Cameron.

I'm your host, Scott Ray, and this is Think Biblically from Talos School of Theology, Biola University. Nigel, welcome. It's good to reconnect with you, and great to have you talking about Dr. Coop, man that we both admire greatly. Great. It'll be here. Thank you. Thank you. Now, for our listeners, you might not be familiar with him,

tell just briefly, who was he, and why is he significant? Well, Chick Coop, Chick was his nickname.

Everybody called him, Chick. He began life, as it were, as the world's most famous pediatric surgeon,

separating, you know, conjoined twins, very celebrated, and basically

building pediatric surgery as a profession in the U.S. So it wasn't really a thing.

I mean, he was one of Pops the first four, three or four full-time pediatric surgeons in the country.

It was adult surgeons would do this stuff on kids, and the kids would

often just die. And Coop was the guy who began to pull the whole thing together and made it work.

All right. Now, just say, what was he like as a person? Well, people often found he rather

gruff. I mean, he could, you know, he could be quite sharp-tonged.

He could complain a bit about people, students, and so on.

But if you got to know him, you know, this mellowed.

And he was never gruff with me, and we were really quite friendly.

I spoke to one of his former Aides, you know, who's now a professor down at University of Chicago, and he said, yes, he said once or twice, he really cut me off and chewed me up, you know, but I'm sure I deserved it. So, Koo had this, this, of course, he was a surgeon, he'd been used to telling everybody what to do for 30 years. But to get to know him, he could really

be very funny. And the thing is, he was a baby doctor. He was a giddy doctor. I mean,

he could spend hours with little children. He could keep them amuse. So he had this incredible

soft side to him, even if he could then flip into top surgeon mode and be much more fierce.

And he called on both of these traits when he was in government.

Now, it's one thing to admire somebody as a person, and admire the life.

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