Truman Blocker on his tenth birthday, April 17, 1919.  As a boy, he milked the family's cow daily.  Below, Blocker at age 17, when he was and underclassman at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.  While in biology class there, he once delivered kittens via Cesarean section.

Truman Blocker was born in West Point, Mississippi, on April 17, 1909, but his family moved to Sherman when he was still an infant.  Blocker's father, Truman, Sr., and his Uncle J. Paul Smith cultivated young Truman's interest in science and business.  The family home had a fenced-in backyard where they raised chickens and a cow, which he milked daily.

"My mother told me from the time I was four or five years old that I was going to be a surgeon," Blocker said in an oral history, adding, "There was never any doubt in my mind" that this would be true.  He received his M. D. in 1933.

During World War II and immediately afterwards, Dr. Blocker was a military surgeon, first in the U. S. Army Air Corps and then in the U. S. Army.  After several assignments, he became chief of plastic surgery and later chief of surgery at the 2,000 bed Wakeman General Hospital in Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where combatants with head and neck injuries were treated.

While he was there, the Army awarded him the Legion of Merit, unique for a plastic surgeon.  Discharged as a Colonel, he continued in the U. S. army Reserve, rising to the rank of brigadier general.  He also was a consultant to the Army's Surgeon General.

On April 16, 1947, Dr. Blocker was in surgery when two freighters loaded with ammonium nitrate exploded at a dock in Texas City, killing 560 people and injuring more than 3,000.  The blast jolted every instrument on his tray.  He ran to the window and saw what he described as a gorgeous mushroom cloud.  "Having a lot of information about the Atomic Bomb," Dr. Blocker said, "I thought this was one and that World War III had started."

Soon truckloads of casualties began arriving.  Dr. Blocker mobilized the entire campus.  "I just said, 'This group here, do triage.  That group, go to a certain place,' and so on.  I sent all the surgical residents to the operating rooms.  They had just gotten out of service and knew how to take orders .... We didn't do anything except Texas City cases."

For nine years, Truman and Virginia Blocker followed more than 800 patients from the Texas City disaster, publishing a number of papers and government reports.  There were an entree into national research support.  The Blockers became renowned for their work on burns.  Both received the Harvey Allen Distinguished Service Award from the American Burns Association.

In 1955, Dr. Blocker was invited to Japan by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission.

For his first twenty years, Dr. Blocker's world largely was centered on the quiet college town of Sherman, Texas, north of Dallas.  By the time he died, on May 17, 1984, it encompassed the globe.