Eugene George Laforet was born on April 18, 1924 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He attended Boston College High School before going on to Boston College, where he was a feature editor for The Heights newspaper in 1943. He graduated in 1944 with a B.A. and attended Tufts University Medical School, where he graduated in 1947 with an M.D.
From September 1942 to June 1976, Laforet was a member of the United States Naval Reserve. He served in the Korean War as a captain in the United States Navy Medical Corps. Laforet was the Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, as well as being a consulting or visiting surgeon at a number of other hospitals in the New England area. He practiced medicine until 1985.
Laforet served as the editor for the Linacre Quarterly and was on the editorial board of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. He received the Thomas Linacre award in 1959 (for his publication “Boxing: Medical and Moral Aspects”) and the Pope John XXI International Prize for Medical Ethics in 1962 (for “The ‘Hopeless Case’”). Between 1970 and 1980, Laforet was the Alumni Lecturer in Medical Ethics in the Department of Theology at Boston College. While at Boston College, he co-taught a course called “Christian Perspectives on Medical Ethics” with Thomas P. O’Malley, SJ. Laforet died on June 8, 2002.
