AIDS lecture November 1, 1987
13/9

The Current Crisis in AIDS

By
C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
Surgeon General
Of the
U.S. Public Health Service

Presented to the
4" Presbyterian Church
Chicago, Illinois
November 1, 1987

It had been three days since I had spoken to a public audience about AIDS and that occasion was
a presentation before the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Oceans and International
Environmental and Scientific Affairs in Washington. From there I went to Atlanta for a
celebration of the Smallpox eradication and then presented a lecture to the 45" Annual
Conference of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in Chicago, Illinois.
This made it easy to do a presentation on AIDS to 4" Presbyterian Church in Chicago.

Ever since preparing the Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome
at the request of President Reagan, I had met with various religious bodies. I had made it clear I
was not only open to speaking to religious groups, but also eager to do so. They were in a
position to disseminate the information I was trying to get to the public and in my association
with them in the preparation of the Report, I had found them open and cooperative. The first
such effort on my part was when Jerry Farwell permitted me to speak not only in his church in
Lynchburg, Virginia but also to the entire student body of Liberty University on the 19" of
January, 1987.

The title of my lecture was “The Current Crisis in AIDS” and is a title I had used on multiple
occasions previously. That doesn’t mean that the lectures all had exactly the same content. Back
in February of 1987, because of the number of requests, I had to speak and the inability to get to
them all, I made a videotape under the title, “The Current Crisis in AIDS” for use by those
groups who were willing to have a taped presentation rather than one in person. That was
released on February 2, 1987.

The same title was then used for the Pasquariello lecture, Philadelphia (April 8, 1987), Annual
Research Dinner, St. Louis, (April 24, 1987), a lecture to the Medical Societies of Berlin,
Germany (July 1, 1987), Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (July 14 1987), the David Packard
Lecture at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda (May 28, 1987),
and the Delaware Valley College AIDS Symposium, Pennsylvania (June 8, 1987).

Each of these lectures was tempered to the audience in question and each of them has been dealt
with specifically in this archive, because they were sufficiently different not to be included under
one descriptive introduction.
The lecture to the 4" Presbyterian Church was given because the 4" Presbyterian Church in
Chicago is a large metropolitan church with a varied congregation, not only in reference to
AIDS, but also ethnicity and economics. It was an ideal church to speak to and that was the
reason I chose to do so while I was in Chicago. This lecture is the closest to the one I gave in
Berlin, Germany and therefore, I will make no further comment about it, nor will there be an
index included.