Surgeon pioneered hip and knee replacements
Lawrence Dorr, a surgeon who led early developments in joint replacement surgery and helped make Los Angeles an international destination for the repair of ailing hips and knees, has died at 79.
Dorr also started the nonprofit Operation Walk to provide free joint replacement surgery for people in underserved countries such as Cuba, Nepal and Guatemala. It has grown into an international charity.
He retired from Keck Hospital of USC last year after a career spanning more than f ive decades. He died Dec. 28 in that same hospital from complications of bacterial pneumonia, his longtime nurse Jeri Ward said.
Dorr was one of the pioneers of installing prosthetic joints that don’t require cement. To make his hip replacement design, which has become an industry standard, Dorr used knowledge he gained early in his career at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey.
“I would spend hours operating on cadaver hips,” he said. “It made me more confident as a surgeon.”
His research led in 1993 to the Dorr Bone Classification system, which is commonly used to categorize bone types prior to hip reconstruction.
Dorr was born April 13, 1941, in Storm Lake, Iowa. When Dorr was 5, he said, a meeting with a missionary physician set him on the path of medicine.
He was studying medicine at the University of Iowa when he met his wife, Marilyn. They married in 1966, and Dorr went on to earn degrees in pharmacology and medicine. After his internship, he served in the Navy as an anesthesiologist. He completed his residency in orthopedic surgery at what is now LAC+ USC Medical Center in Los Angeles before starting his fellowship in joint replacement under Chitranjan Ranawat in New York.
He returned to Los Angeles to begin his career as an orthopedic surgeon in 1978. He went on to publish hundreds of peer- reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, and books on total joint replacement. He trained more than 100 clinical and research fellows.
After learning of the charitable group Operation Smile, which travels the world doing surgery on impoverished children to correct cleft lips, he founded Operation Walk.
The charity sends teams of surgeons, doctors, nurses and physical therapists abroad to perform hip and knee replacements. The group has operated on more than 13,000 people.
Dorr lived in Pasadena. He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.