An excerpt from Dr. Koop: The Many Lives of the Surgeon General.

“I’ve had two major messages that I’ve tried to get out to the public all my professional life,” Koop proclaimed. “One is to take charge of your own health. The other is that there is no prescription I can give you that is more valuable than knowledge … I’ve tried the non-profit world, and the non-profit world is not interested in supporting those messages on the Internet or in any other way.”

Koop had first encountered actor and entrepreneur John F. Zaccaro in 1991, when Zaccaro persuaded him to join other well-known figures, including violinist Itzhak Perlman and Good Morning America’s Nancy Snyderman, on the advisory board of the International Health and Medical Film Festival, home of the Freddie awards. In 1994, Koop was invited to be the celebrity speaker. It was Zaccaro who introduced him to Donald Hackett, described by Fortune as a “20-year veteran of the health information industry.” Together, at Hackett’s urging, the three of them brainstormed “Dr. Koop’s Personal Medical Record System,” a modest effort to enable patients to manage their own medical histories and costs on their home computers. So, on July 17, 1997, the company was founded as plain “Personal Medical Records Inc.” (PMRi). On October 1 of that year, Koop was in post as chairman of PMRi, with a three-year contract, at a fee rising to $150,000 in the third year. Meanwhile, trademark filings were being made for “Dr. Koop’s Community” – and “drkoop.com.”

This original, modest business model rapidly evolved into a web-based strategy, in which medical record-keeping would be online and just one of a wide range of offerings. “Personal Medical Records Inc.” became “Empower Health Corporation.” The site launched in July 1998. Six months later, we find Nancy Snyderman hosting a Q and A on spastic colon, there are twenty-two facts to discourage holiday drunk driving, and one of the “interactive communities” is discussing healthy aging.

Once the site was up and running, the company moved to raise capital by selling stock in an IPO – with what some observers regarded as unseemly haste. Bear Stearns, the merchant bank, was happy to take the company into the public market, and the IPO was, initially, a success. On Tuesday, June 8, 1999, they sold 9.4 million shares at $9 each, raising $84.4 million for the company. The stock briefly hit an all-time high of $47.75, rendering Koop’s slice of the pie a theoretical $119 million. Meanwhile, one friend told Koop that he had wrung his hands when he heard there was an IPO on the horizon because “People don’t want Dr. Koop to be a multimillionaire. They want him to save babies, blow the whistle on AIDS, and take on the tobacco industry.” Another friend, former chief of staff Edward Martin, had pointedly declined Koop’s invitation to join the board of directors.

In The Wall Street Journal’s memorable turn of phrase, the company’s core strategy was “to tap the credibility of the feisty Dr. Koop.” The plan was to deploy this singular name to “establish an identifiable brand in an increasingly crowded field of health and wellness concerns.” The Washington Post made a similar point. “New Internet stocks have a reputation for pulling off stunts like that, though in fact recent ones ran into a bit of trouble as investors have grown wary. But Drkoop.com restored the magic. It has something that none of the others do: Koop.” As CEO Donald Hackett put it to me, “Dr. Koop’s insights, ethics, and principles set a standard everyone at the company aspired to live by.” Empower Health’s modest ambition to host personal health records on home computers had morphed into a towering offering that briefly made DrKoop.com the world’s top health site.

So, as web magazine ZDNet asked, “How could a venture headed by the most recognized physician since Marcus Welby MD fall so far so fast?”

Meanwhile, their core value proposition – “you trust Dr. Koop, so you can trust DrKoop.com” – had been coming under threat. The magic of the Koop name that lay at the core of the company’s offering was being turned upside down by a series of blunders.

Controversy grew over the blurred line between ads and information on the site. One writer had been exploring a “DrKoop.com Community Partners Program” that “contained a list of hospitals and health centers described as ‘the most innovative and advanced health care institutions across the country.’ In fact, the list was an advertisement for 14 hospitals, each of which had paid a fee of about $40,000 to be included.”

Koop was stung by these criticisms and responded swiftly, though reputational damage had already been done.

He convened the top twenty health sites in a project called “HI-Ethics” – for “Health Internet Ethics” – that on May 8, 2000, released a set of principles addressing the thorny issues concerned. But by then the stock of DrKoop.com was way down.

An effort to put in new management and new money failed to shore up the site. When runway runs out, the end is swift. “Shortly before the bankruptcy filing, DrKoop stock was worth less than a penny a share.” You get bargains at a fire sale, and Florida e-commerce company Vitacost, hawking discount vitamins, snapped up the website URL and its brand for $186,000 – together with nearly one million registered email addresses that came with it. That was the ultimate indignity for Koop. A zombie DrKoop.com website would long outlive him, and he could do nothing about it. As required by law, at the foot of every page it states: “This website is not associated with C. Everett Koop, M.D., former Surgeon General of the United States.” The problem, of course, is that, after all these years, it is associated with him, a living monument to the failure of his venture.

DrKoop.com went down with accumulated losses of $207 million.

Some contemporary assessments were unforgiving. Fortune fumed about “Dr. Koop and the Greed Disease,” accusing the company of “mediocre leadership, a huge burn rate, and a flimsy business plan.” The online magazine Tedium offered a gentler assessment. “DrKoop.com … could have really worked out well, and everyone working with that company knew it.”

Koop later reflected ruefully to his friends Alan and Rhea Johnson, at evangelical Wheaton College, “I guess the Lord never wanted me to have a lot of money.”

Nigel Cameron is a historian and ethicist whose work has spanned the disciplines of bioethics, history, and religion over a distinguished transatlantic academic career. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and was previously a research professor of bioethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he led pioneering projects on the social and ethical impact of emerging technologies and on diabetes policy. A former Fulbright visiting research chair at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science, Society and Policy, he continues to explore the intersection of medicine, ethics, and public policy.

Dr. Cameron was the founding editor of the journal Ethics and Medicine and has served as a hospital consulting ethicist. He has held board roles with UK think tanks 2020health.org and BioCentre, and has testified before committees of the U.S. Congress and the European Union. He has also represented the United States in diplomatic delegations to United Nations health-related agencies and was nominated by the U.S. government to serve as UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Health.

His books include Dr. Koop: The Many Lives of the Surgeon General, Will Robots Take Your Job? A Plea for Consensus, and The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates. His current project, Ruth: The Psychiatrist Who Saved Sylvia Plath, Until She Couldn’t, continues his exploration of complex figures in medicine.

For more about his work, visit drkoop.bio, or connect with him on Facebook and LinkedIn.