American physician who was a pioneer in sex reassignment surgery, performing thousands of procedures during his long career. Biber performed more than 2300 male-to-female genital reassignment surgeries and 1000 female-to-male surgeries.
Biber graduated from the University of Iowa medical school in 1948. He began performing surgery while in residency at a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. Biber then joined the Army, where he was the chief surgeon of a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. He finished his service at what is now Fort Carson, Colorado, and in 1954 took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado. He delivered babies, set broken bones, and was considered an excellent surgeon by the town.
Biber performed his first sex reassignment surgery in 1969 after a trans woman asked him if he would be willing and able to do so. At first, he did not know how, but he learned by studying diagrams from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He kept his first few surgeries secret from the Catholic nuns who operated the hospital, due to concerns that they would react negatively. Trinidad became known as the “Sex Change Capital of the World” because of his renown.
Biber also trained dozens of other surgeons in sex reassignment surgery techniques and maintained a regular surgical practice of delivering babies, removing tonsils, and replacing knee and hip joints.
Biber retired in 2003, at age 80, because his malpractice insurance premiums had risen to levels which he could not afford. Marci Bowers, a gynaecologist and transgender woman herself, took over his SRS practice. Biber was hospitalized in January 2006 with complications from pneumonia, to which he succumbed on 16 January while hospitalized at age 82.
Link to Wikipedia biography