Died Oct. 5, 2009

RENO, Nev. (AP)—Dr. Frederick Wirth Jr., the physician to the first test-tube baby in the United States, has died, his family said Friday. He was 68.

Wirth died Monday of pancreatic cancer in Carson City, said his wife, Linda Wirth.

Wirth gained national attention as the neonatologist who cared for Elizabeth Jordan Carr after her birth on Dec. 28, 1981.

Carr, now a 27-year-old news content producer for the Boston Globe’s Web site Boston.com, described Wirth as “the guy who took me out of the delivery room and carried me under his arm like I was a football.”

She said Wirth conducted tests after she was delivered by Drs. Mason Andrews and Howard Jones.

Wirth pronounced her healthy and normal at the first news conference, which the nation watched eagerly at a time when such medical technology was new and scary.

“I don’t look at him as a doctor, he’s family. It [his death] is part of losing your family,” Carr said.

Wirth met Carr for the first time in 2003 in Boston, where the two discussed the four-page letter he wrote to her the day after she was born.

It tells her that in spite of her unusual conception—in a petri dish—she was a normal human being.

Carr said it was comforting to have someone other than her parents tell her that, adding that the letter got her through tough times of feeling insecure.

“This man told me that he could tell I would turn out just fine,” she said. “He told me no matter how hard things got that I had two parents who really wanted to have a baby of their own.”

At the meeting, Wirth said he always wondered what kind of a woman Carr had become. She graduated the following year from Simmons College in Boston.

Carr’s father, Roger Carr of Fitchburg, Mass., described Wirth as an intelligent, caring physician who made him and his wife, Judy, feel comfortable before and after the birth.

Roger Carr said his daughter was the 15th test-tube baby born worldwide.

“The medical community has lost a wonderful, loving physician who was always trying to help his patients,” he said. “We will always have a special place in our heart for him.”

Elizabeth Carr was born three years after the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in England. More than a million test-tube babies have been born since.

Over the last decade, Wirth authored “Prenatal Parenting” and established the Institute for Perinatal Education.

He thought parents could have happier children if they managed stress and avoided anger, and risky behaviors during pregnancy, Linda Wirth said.

Wirth cared for about 10,000 babies during his career and worked at Reading Hospital and Medical Center in Pennsylvania about 10 days a month until June, Linda Wirth said.

The New Orleans native received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his medical degree from Tulane University in 1967.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to a study panel on life support systems for malformed infants.