Lawrence H. Cohn

Lawrence H. Cohn was an American cardiac surgeon, researcher and medical educator, born in San Francisco in 1937 and died in 2016. He took his bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and his medical degree at Stanford in 1962, where he trained under the heart surgeon Norman Shumway, and he completed further surgical training in Boston, Bethesda and San Francisco. He joined the Harvard Medical School surgical staff in 1971, became Professor of Surgery in 1980 and in 2000 held the first endowed chair in cardiac surgery there. He served as chief of cardiac surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital from 1987 to 2005. Cohn performed more than eleven thousand cardiac operations and was an expert in heart valve repair and replacement, including minimally invasive valve surgery. He published over 440 original articles and edited the widely used textbook Cardiac Surgery in the Adult, edited the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and led the American Association for Thoracic Surgery as its president. He trained more than 150 residents and fellows.