Obituaries

Louis Lazar, a longtime family practice physician and one-time chair of UB’s Department of Family Practice, died April 28 in his North Buffalo home. He was 98.

Lazar, remembered by family and friends as an old country doctor practicing in a big city, ran a family practice in Buffalo’s Black Rock-Riverside neighborhood for nearly six decades and made house calls until the 1970s.

He retired in 2006 at age 87, but his legacy has continued at the two Louis Lazar Family Medicine Centers — on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo and on Maple Road in Amherst — where new medical residents are trained and some of his 15,000 former patients continue to be seen.

An Eden native, Lazar earned his bachelor’s degree from UB. He graduated from Chicago Medical School in the mid-1940s, completing his medical residencies at the Cook County Hospital and the old Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo.

His medical career was interrupted briefly at the end of the Korean War era, when he served with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Germany from 1953-55.

Back in Buffalo as a physician, Lazar worked for years to preserve the family practice model at both Millard Fillmore Hospital and the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

During his more than half-century as a physician working with families, he delivered thousands of babies, including three generations of some families.

He helped to establish an international residency-exchange program between China and Buffalo, through Millard Fillmore Hospital, in 1981, and also delivered drug samples to African countries.