Obituaries

Karel B. Absolon Heart Surgeon

Karel B. Absolon, 83, a former chief of surgery at Washington Hospital Center who later worked at the National Institutes of Health, died of respiratory failure Oct. 2 at his home in Rockville.

Dr. Absolon, a heart surgeon, worked at Washington Hospital Center from 1972 to 1977 and then moved to Danville, Ill., where he worked in a Veterans Administration facility for four years. He retired from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at NIH in the mid-1980s.

Dr. Absolon wrote a three-volume biography of Theodor Billroth, the father of modern gastrointestinal surgery and numerous other books on medical and surgical topics. He amassed an extensive library of history and medical history, including books on geneticist Gregor Mendel and on Tomas Masaryk, the first president of the former Czechoslovakia.

Karel Bedrich Absolon was born in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, and he attended a year of medical school there before fleeing the country in 1948 during the Communist takeover. He was a 1953 graduate of Yale University's medical school. A decade later, he received a master's degree in physiology and a doctorate in surgery from the University of Minnesota.

He taught briefly at Minnesota and then moved to Amarillo, Tex., where he practiced cardiac surgery until moving to Washington in 1972.

He donated his 2,300-volume library to East Carolina University, which also named an annual history of medicine lecture in his honor. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the International College of Surgeons, and he was active in a history of medicine society and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences.

A son, Fritz Absolon, died in 1978 and another, Peter Absolon, died in 2007.

Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Mary Absolon of Rockville; three children, Mary Herber of Edina, Minn., John Absolon of Rockville and Martha Delehanty of Long Valley, N.J.; and seven grandchildren.

-- Patricia Sullivan

Robert D. Ladd Marketing Executive

Robert D. Ladd, 87, founder and president of Haverhill International, a marketing and business development company in Poolesville, from 1979 until his retirement in 2007, died Oct. 1 at his home in Poolesville of a pulmonary embolism.