Pierce Scranton Jr., Doctor of Science

Pierce E. Scranton Jr., son of Kenyon: You distinguished yourself as a student at the College by graduating cum laude with high honors in biology. You took special pride in your gross and microscopic anatomy laboratories, and you drank in the nectar of your humanities courses. You then trained to become an orthopaedic surgeon, going on to invent a technique using the hamstring tendons to replace torn ligaments in the knee joint. You repaired the knees of several professional football players and served as team physician for the Seattle Seahawks. You pioneered a new method for ankle repair by using cartilage from the knee to regenerate blood circulation to damaged bone. In your spare time, you wrote your first popular book, Playing Hurt: Treating and Evaluating Warriors of the NFL. After learning about injuries and serious deformities in Vietnamese children caused by land mines and food grown on soil contaminated with Agent Orange, you established clinics in Vietnam to repair malformed and damaged limbs, making it possible for many crippled children to walk for the first time. You learned to speak Vietnamese and provided training for local doctors to learn the techniques of joint-replacement surgery and arthroscopy so that they could continue and expand your work. Author of more than one hundred technical papers, you have also served for almost three decades as an associate editor of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. In addition, you have found time to write a prize-winning novel, Death on the Learning Curve, the story of a young intern faced with real life and death situations. Pierce Scranton, we honor you this day for your exemplary life as a renowned surgeon, humanitarian, and scholar.

- Citation by Robert Burns, Professor Emeritus of Biology