Judson Randolph, the former chief of surgery at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, professor of surgery and pediatrics at George Washington University and a national leader in pediatric surgery, died May 17 at his home in Nashville. He was 87.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his son Judson Randolph Jr.
Randolph came to Washington in 1963 and retired in 1991 as surgeon in chief at Children’s Hospital. He performed hundreds of surgeries a year and supervised hundreds more.
It was not unusual for him to spend seven or eight hours a day in the operating room on surgical procedures. They included the removal of a two-inch pin lodged dangerously near the lung in the trachea of a 2-year-old, the separation of conjoined twins, hundreds of heart, lung, brain and intestinal procedures, and various burn injuries.
In 1978 he was featured in an episode of the NBC show “Lifeline.” “I don’t know what it is about this medicine,” he told The Washington Post at the time. “I guess it’s the freshness. The promise of it all. You get a kid’s lung straightened out and send him on his way for the next 75 years. . . . Wow!”
Randolph was a former chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ surgical section, president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association and a founder of the American Board of Surgery’s pediatric committee. He wrote about 200 publications on subjects such as endocrine disorders and liver transplants and lectured around the world.
Judson Graves Randolph was born July 19, 1927, in Macon, Georgia, and grew up in Nashville. After Navy service in 1945 and 1946, he graduated in 1950 from Vanderbilt University in Nashville and in 1953 from its medical school.
He trained in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and at Boston Children’s Hospital and was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School before coming to Washington.
At Children’s Hospital, he projected an image as “a man in a pair of Nike sneakers, perpetually in a hurry,” Post columnist Bob Levey wrote.
He drove a jeep to work, usually arriving by 7 a.m. The Post said that he was a man of “disarming likability … informal Southern manner and wide-open blue eyes.” To staffers and patients at Children’s Hospital, he was not unlike actor Alan Alda’s character in the television series “M*A*S*H.”
“But what sets Randolph apart … is his rapport with sick kids and their parents,” Levey wrote. “He is one of the most comforting doctors you’ll ever see.”
A former Chevy Chase resident, Randolph moved back to Nashville after retiring.
His wife of 49 years, Comfort Adams Randolph, died in 2001. Survivors include five children, Somers Randolph of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Garrett Randolph of Belfast, Maine, Judson Randolph Jr. of Seattle, Adam Randolph of Sewanee, Tennessee and Comfort Belbas of Edina, Minnesota.; and eight grandchildren.