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My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

I always wanted to follow in the footsteps of my maternal grandfather, who was a doctor.

My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.

My dad was a doctor and surgeon. He was the fifth generation of his family to become a doctor.

I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s, before we had any government. It worked rather well, and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care.

My father was a doctor.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well.

My parents both are physicians, and my grandfathers were both physicians.