Surgeon General Gupta?

Barack Obama has asked Sanjay Gupta, the medical correspondent for CNN and CBS to serve as Surgeon General. I’ve seen him on CNN and CBS before.  He seems respectable and appears to know what he’s talking about.  But  he’s got a kind of celebrity about him, which as Michelle Malkin notes, is in keeping with Obama’s celebrity. But he’s more than that, though, as Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner reminds us. Back in 2003, he operated on a Marine serving in Baghdad who shot in the head by a sniper:

As a neurosurgeon, I was asked to step back from my journalist’s role to look at his gunshot wound to the head. Shortly thereafter, I was removing a bullet from his brain. Within an hour, Jesus had been treated, operated on and was recovering just outside the operating room.

In all the years I have worked in hospitals, I have never seen resources mobilized so quickly and health care workers move with such purpose. And, remember, it was a tent in the middle of the desert by the dark of night in the most dangerous place on Earth.

I wouldn’t be telling you this story if Jesus hadn’t survived and done well.

He is a handsome young man who is considering a career in physical therapy and still trying to reconcile his brush with death. I visited him last year in Southern California and his mother slowly walked over to me and took my hands and said simply, “Thank you.”

I still remember looking over at my producer Stephanie Smith and watching her begin to cry, which of course made me cry as well. This story, though, is more than a story about one Marine who lived, when so many thought he would die. It is about the remarkable technology and brilliant thinking that has brought the wounded of this war to doctors and nurses faster than ever before. This is a story about brave men and women who risk their lives every day so they might save others.

I don’t have a problem with Dr. Gupta serving as SG.

Update: Here’s another reason why I don’t mind Dr. Sanjay Gupta being named Surgeon General: He took on Michael Moore and knocked down every argument he made in his movie Sicko. Read all of Mary Katharine Ham’s piece at Weekly Standard. Her take is one with which I agree.

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