Pueblo
— Dr. Stanley Biber <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Biber>,
a small-town physician who said he performed more than
4,500 sex-change operations, has died, a funeral home
owner said Tuesday. He was 82.
The cause of Biber's
death on Monday was not announced, but he had been
hospitalized for complications from pneumonia.
Word of Biber's death
came from Mary Winter, a friend and owner of the Cormi
Funeral Home in Trinidad, a town of 9,300 near the
Colorado-New Mexico border.
Biber, an Iowa native,
moved to Trinidad in 1954 and became the town's only
general surgeon. He told The Associated Press in a
2000 interview that he performed his first sex-change
operation in 1969.
He said a social worker
he had met asked for the surgery, and he agreed after
talking to a New York doctor who had done some sex
reassignment operations and after getting sketches from
Johns Hopkins University <http://www.jhu.edu/>.
At one point he was
performing 150 transsexual operations a year, Biber
said.
He stopped doing surgery
in 2003 and closed his practice in 2004, at age
81.
