Rodgers, L. Rodney

Personne

Rodgers, L. Rodney

• Rodgers, Lawrence Rodney

1920-2012

Lawrence Rodney Rogers, MD, was born March 9, 1920 in Clovis, New Mexico, to a cowboy and a schoolteacher, and died December 13, 2012, in Houston. He grew up in Amarillo, Texas. He was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society during his junior year at the University of Texas Medical Branch. He volunteered for the US Army during World War II and served as a battalion surgeon in the 42nd Rainbow Division in the European Theater, including the Battle of the Bulge, for which he earned three Bronze Stars and four Battle Stars. Accounts of his treatment of prisoners at Dachau and Jewish patients in occupied Austria are on video at the Houston Holocaust Museum.
Dr. Rodgers specialized in internal medicine at Philadelphia General Hospital for three years before returning to Texas to practice in Houston from 1949 to 1994. He was chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Hermann Hospital in 1965 and was active in the effort to establish the University of Texas Medical School at Hermann in 1966-1967 and served the school both as a professor and member of many committees.
Dr. Rodgers served the Harris County Medical Society as TMA delegate, on the executive board, and for a year as vice president, and was for a time editor of the Harris County Physician. He served as President of the Houston Society of Internal Medicine in 1974, of the Houston Academy of Medicine in 1981, of the Doctors’ Club in 1986, and the Houston Philosophical Society in 1994, and supported and participated in many more organizations. He was awarded the Ashbel Smith Distinguished Alumni Award by UTMB, and the American College of Physicians awarded him both a Laureate Internist Award for Texas and Mastership of the College.