Lloyd M. Taylor, Jr., MD

Lloyd Mccully Taylor Jr. was the 17th president of the Western Vascular Society. Dr. Taylor was born at the Mayo Clinic when his father, also a surgeon, was in training as a general and thoracic surgeon. When his father completed surgical training at Mayo the family moved to Great Falls, Montana. Lloyd then grew up in Great Falls and had an early introduction to surgery by assisting his father in the operating room while still in high school. After high school, he attended Colorado College where he met his wife, Catherine. Following college, they moved East where Lloyd attended medical school at Duke, his father’s alma mater. At Duke, Dr. Taylor, always a bit of an iconoclast, choose not to live in Raleigh, but in a renovated bus in the woods outside the city. Upon graduating from Duke in 1973, Dr. Taylor joined the Public Health Service (PHS) for a year where he provided all medical and also de facto veterinary services for the native American population in the Grand Canyon, as there were no other physicians or any veterinarians available.

After a year with the PHS he moved to Portland where he did his general surgery residency at what was then known as the University of Oregon Medical School. There he met Dr. John Porter, also a Duke graduate, and became the first vascular fellow at Oregon. After fellowship, he entered private practice in Portland for a year and then returned to the university to join Dr. Porter as a faculty member in the Division of Vascular Surgery where he remained for his entire career until retirement. While working, Dr. Taylor was known as a technically and academically gifted, no-nonsense surgeon, a wonderful surgical partner, and by some as “the guy with the beard and ponytail.”

While on faculty at Oregon, Dr. Taylor developed a love for long distance sailing, and at one point decided he could have “a boat, a house, or retire but not all three.” True to form, he retired early, sold his house, and sailed away, migrating up and down the West coast for many years, spending summers in Alaskan waters and winters in the Mexican waters of Baja California. He has since returned to Portland following “a mutiny by the crew,” meaning Catherine had grown a bit weary of living full time on a sailboat. Return to land-based living has since allowed him to spend more time with his son and granddaughter and to offer advice on retirement, as he says he is “really good at it!”