Lawrence D. Dorr, MD, founder of Operation Walk, dies
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Lawrence D. Dorr, MD, founder of Operation Walk and a founding member of several orthopedic societies, died on Dec. 28, 2020. He was 79 years old.
Dorr began his career in 1978 as an attending surgeon at Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center and Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, according to a release from Operation Walk. Throughout his career, Dorr published hundreds of peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters and books on the practice of total joint replacement, the release noted.
“When you go through [Dorr’s] biography, you [see] he has written all these scientific articles on all of the most important subjects or topics in joint replacement, but he did that while he was doing the operations, while he was designing the implants [and] while he was founding societies with the greatest surgeons in the world,” William T. Long, MD, founder and director of the Computer Surgery Institute at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, told Healio Orthopedics.
In 1996, Dorr founded Operation Walk, a volunteer organization that provides free joint replacement for people in underserved countries and in the United States and education to local health care professionals in Cuba, China, Nepal, the Philippines, El Salvador, Tanzania, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Vietnam.
“Dr. Dorr, being the leader and the visionary, got together surgeons who loved to operate and help others for free; nurses; people who could not operate, who were not medical, but could give money; and, by the power of his spirit, he inspired almost 20 other groups to form Operation Walk chapters around the country and around the world,” Long said.
In addition, Dorr was a founding member of The Knee Society, The Hip Society and the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons. The release noted he also founded The Bone and Joint Institute in 1999 and The Arthritis Institute in 2001.
Dorr retired from Keck Medical Center of USC in 2019.
“In Larry Dorr’s passing, orthopedic joint replacement surgery has lost a real contemporary contributor to the discipline. Those who knew him will always remember a larger-than-life character whose no-nonsense approach to accepting nothing less than excellence in hip and knee reconstruction was his mantra,” A. Seth Greenwald, D.Phil(Oxon), Orthopedics Today Editorial Board Member, told Healio Orthopedics. “I will always count Larry as a friend and stand-up colleague who, both in his personal practice and through the founding of Operation Walk, continues to bring arthritic relief to thousands of patients around the world who otherwise might have been excluded from the best of orthopedic health care. Larry’s contributions to the orthopedic peer-reviewed literature, his dedication to educate through the Masters [Series Annual Meetings], as well as his ability and imagination to characterize life’s experiences as a novelist, all define an individual who has made his mark. He will be missed.”
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