Surgeon General's Reports on the Web

Full text copies of all reports issued by the United States Surgeon General are now available on the Web at http://sgreports.nlm.nih.gov/NN/. This new site, which includes over 70 digitized reports, is the result of collaboration between NLM and the Office of the Surgeon General. The collection includes Reports, Proceedings, and Workshops from 1964 - 2000, as well as Reports, Conference Reports and Proceedings, and Calls to Action since 2000. These latter materials are also available in NLM's HSTAT at http://hstat.nlm.nih.gov.

Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, the Surgeon General -- whose title means chief surgeon -- is the federal government's principal spokesperson on matters of public health. In recent decades, the Surgeon General has been a respected voice on public health issues, preventive medicine, and health promotion through public appearances, speeches, and reports and publications. The Surgeon General has often been called upon to deal with difficult and controversial issues, such as smoking and sexual health. The Surgeon General's public statements often served to generate debate where there had been silence, to the benefit of the nation's health.

The collection begins with the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health and includes many issues related to national health and social policy. Later reports continued the examination of smoking and health and also included reports on aging, AIDS and HIV, child health, health promotion and disease prevention, Hispanic and Latino health, mental health, oral health, physical activity and health, sexual abuse, suicide, and television violence among others.

The site includes an online Exhibit, which includes a selection of documents and visuals, organized by subject. The exhibit provides short essays and lists of reports both alphabetical and chronological by document type. All of the materials may be accessed via a search engine as well; searches may be conducted through the entire text as well as metadata. - JKK

(Editor's Note: Taken from an email message from Marjorie A. Cahn, Head, National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology and from the NLM web exhibit, Reports of the Surgeon General.)

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