We are greatly saddened by the passing of Howard L. Gordon at the age of 95. Dr. Gordon was a co-founder of the Baker Gordon Symposium and instrumental in the progression of aesthetic surgery education throughout the last half century.
Dr. Gordon received his plastic surgery training in Chicago, Illinois, and entered practice with Dr. Thomas Baker in Miami, Florida in the early 1960s.
When he entered practice, his focus was the broad spectrum of plastic surgery. Both Tom and Howard covered most hospitals in the Miami area, offering primarily emergency care and reconstructive procedures. Always interested in helping others, Dr. Gordon was one of the original physicians to travel yearly on the “Hope Ship” which journeyed to South America and Africa offering medical care to populations that had no access to physicians or surgical specialists.
Resulting from the demand for cosmetic surgery in the South Florida area, Howard and Tom became interested in improving their expertise in aesthetic surgery. While attempting to learn rhinoplasty, he traveled around the country to visit the known experts in the 1960s but was only allowed to observe from across the operating room with the key maneuvers of the procedures covered by the expert surgeon’s hands.
Due to his frustration in terms of learning how to perform aesthetic surgery procedures, Dr. Baker and Dr. Gordon founded the Baker Gordon Symposium on Cosmetic Surgery in 1967. Over the ensuing 57 years, the Baker Gordon Symposium has trained tens of thousands of plastic surgeons in aesthetic techniques, mirroring the progression of aesthetic surgery over the past fifty years.
Dr. Gordon is celebrated and remembered as a masterful technician, an artist in surgical outcomes and for his great oratory skills. His contributions to the progression of aesthetic surgery education remain…a legacy within our specialty.
“Remembering Dr. Gordon, ASPS, “Colleagues pay tribute to Howard Gordon”
