Next Step: HOPE

In Next Step: Hope, Dr. Lawrence Dorr, a world renowned hip and knee surgeon, tells the astonishing story of Operation Walk, a pioneering organization that offers free hip and knee replacements to those who could never otherwise receive them. What began as a wild idea on a midnight train ride across Russia became an international humanitarian organization that takes volunteer medical teams—along with tons of equipment, supplies and implants—to some of the neediest people in the world, changing their lives with the gift of mobility.

In Next Step: Hope, Dr. Lawrence Dorr, a world renowned hip and knee surgeon, tells the astonishing story of Operation Walk, a pioneering organization that offers free hip and knee replacements to those who could never otherwise receive them. What began as a wild idea on a midnight train ride across Russia became an international humanitarian organization that takes volunteer medical teams—along with tons of equipment, supplies and implants—to some of the neediest people in the world, changing their lives with the gift of mobility. Dr. Dorr was a giant in his field. He developed many of the most commonly used procedures for total joint replacement, and designed the implants themselves. But his greatest contribution to medicine, he believed, was the healing gift of love that came with Operation Walk. Feeling the joy of patients who could now work again, care for families again, hope again, changed everyone who participated. "None of us had counted on the way serving people who needed us so much would open our hearts," he writes. "They gave our work meaning again." In this inspiring book, Dr. Dorr traces the way the unlikely vision of Operation Walk took hold—powered not just by imagination and persistence, but by joy.

Dr. Lawrence Dorr, the founder of Operation Walk, was an internationally respected orthopedic surgeon and one of only two surgeons to be president of all three prestigious knee and hip replacement societies. Dr. Dorr was the author of 300 scientific articles, as well as the definitive book on hip replacement surgery. For his work with Operation Walk, which has given free knee and hip replacements to thousands of people who could never otherwise afford them, he was honored in 2005 by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons as Humanitarian of the Year . A native of Iowa and a graduate of the University of Iowa Medical School, Dr. Dorr, with his wife Marilyn, established a chair for hip surgery at the University of Iowa and founded the Dimensions Program for healthcare students at Cornell College in Iowa. He was the proud father of three children, Mike, Randy and Kristina.