Milton Thomas Edgerton Jr., MD, a renowned plastic surgeon who pioneered multiple breakthrough procedures in plastic surgery, died at age 96, according to The Washington Post.
Dr. Edgerton passed away May 17 in Charlottesville, Va., after a three-year battle with multiple myeloma and malignant melanoma. He was recognized as one of the most courageous and leading figures in plastic surgery in the U.S.
Born in Atlanta on July 14, 1921, Dr. Edgerton received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Atlanta's Emory University in 1941 and earned a medical degree from Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University in 1944. After a his surgical internship at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. He joined the army, serving at Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pa., for the next three years. During this time, he performed more than 15,000 operations, while inventing and perfecting many reconstructive procedures used today.
Dr. Edgerton joined the faculty at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 as chief of plastic surgery and became the institution's youngest tenured professor in 1962, writing four medical textbooks and more than 500 academic papers throughout his career.
Dr. Edgerton is most known for his development and perfection of gender confirmation surgery. By 1965, he was treating transgender patients at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic who turned to Dr. Edgerton in an era of medicine where few surgeons in the U.S. offered sex-reassignment operations.
He founded and lead Charlottesville-based University of Virginia's department of plastic surgery — one of the first in the nation — in 1970, and continued to practice medicine there until retiring in 1994.
Dr. Edgerton served as the president of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons and in 1974 received, at the time, the highest honor in plastic surgery, the Dow Corning International Award of Merit.
Dr. Edgerton and his family announced the creation of the Milton T. Edgerton professorship of plastic and reconstructive surgery at John Hopkins in 2011. This gift helped launch a fully developed plastic surgery department, which fulfilled his "longtime dream" and served as the perfect culmination of his life's work, Paul Mason, MD and Dr. Egerton's successor told The Washington Post.
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