Ron Lapin

Ronald Lapin, who lived from 1941 until 16 May 1995, was an Israeli-born American surgeon remembered as the bloodless surgeon, because he operated on severely anemic Jehovah's Witness patients without transfused blood, which their religion forbids. He completed medical school in New York City and set up his practice in Orange County, California, in the 1970s. After a first successful operation on a Witness patient in the mid-1970s, other Witnesses came to him, and he went on to found several bloodless surgery centers in Southern California, including hospitals in Norwalk, Bellflower and Fountain Valley, and to advocate non-blood medical management. He promoted the use of electric scalpels to reduce blood loss, and in 1980 he was chosen to operate on Witness patients using the artificial blood substitute Fluosol DA under conditional FDA approval. His practices drew legal challenges, and his story is told in Gene Church's biography No Man's Blood.