Rupert Blue

Rupert Blue was an American physician and public health officer who served as the fourth Surgeon General of the United States from 1912 to 1920. He was born in Richmond County, North Carolina, on 30 May 1868, attended the University of Virginia, earned his medical degree at the University of Maryland in 1892, and joined the Marine Hospital Service, later the United States Public Health Service, in 1893. He oversaw rat eradication and urban sanitation work in San Francisco after the bubonic plague epidemics of 1902 to 1904 and 1907 to 1908 and the earthquake of 1906, and directed mosquito eradication in New Orleans in 1905, at the Jamestown Exposition in 1907 and in Hawaii in 1911. President William Howard Taft nominated him to the post after the death of Walter Wyman, and he also chaired the International Sanitary Bureau. He died on 12 April 1948.