Dr. Basil Pruitt Jr., a physician and scientist who pioneered many burn treatment advances that saved patients’ lives, died Sunday in San Antonio. He was 88.

A retired colonel who led the Army’s Institute of Surgical Research for 27 years, he studied why burn wounds become infected and, with the ISR laboratory division chief, the late Arthur D. Mason Jr., developed and tested a cream that reduced that risk.

At the institute, Pruitt created a model in which rigorous scientific inquiry was followed by dramatic improvements in care that were shared with civilian burn centers worldwide. Burn patients now have a far better chance of survival than they did 50 years ago.

“The one word which comes to mind when thinking of Dr. Basil A. Pruitt Jr. is ‘giant,’” Dr. Lee Cancio, a retired Army colonel and now civilian director of the ISR’s burn center at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, said Monday.

“I learned recently that Dr. Pruitt wondered whether he had done enough in his professional career,” Cancio added. “In reality, his contributions far exceeded those of the vast majority of fellow surgeons. He, more than anyone, is rightfully considered the father of modern burn care.”

Pruitt, long retired from the Army, was still active last fall, addressing a conference in Boston, maintaining a basement office at University Hospital, holding the Dr. Ferdinand P. Herff Chair in surgery at UT Health San Antonio and consulting for the ISR.

He struggled to regain his health after colon surgery last winter and died of complications. Services are pending.

A prodigious researcher, Pruitt generated a series of influential papers on burns, the first of which appeared in the Annals of Surgery in 1964. Detailing mortality in 1,100 consecutive burns treated at the ISR, it brought him recognition as a clinician and settled the question of what area he would study.

“It told people that if you were a young adult in the United States at that time and got a 43 percent burn, not even half of the body surface, you had a 50-50 chance of living or dying,” Pruitt told the San Antonio Express-News last year. “And that’s really what convinced me that working in the field of burn management had a future because the outlook was so bad that you could make a real improvement with appropriate studies to find out what to do.”

Fifty-five years after that first paper was published, colleagues say Pruitt remains the most-cited researcher in burn care. Dr. Evan Renz, a former Brooke Army Medical Center commander who led the burn center from 2008 to 2013, said no other researcher produced more peer-reviewed papers on burns.

Pruitt’s lifetime research output totaled 469 papers in peer-reviewed publications, 181 chapters in textbooks and 15 books and monographs. By his own accounting, as many as two dozen major papers led to significant improvements in patient care.

“He got people thinking about things his whole career,” Renz said. “He was a dominant thought leader in the area of burn management and treatment for many years.”

Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Peake, a former Veterans Affairs secretary, said Pruitt “had a profound influence not only in the United States but … around the world,” helping train doctors who later headed burn centers.

“It would be hard to find somebody in surgery and medicine that has a longer and greater legacy than Basil Pruitt,” said Peak, also a former BAMC commander.

Pruitt’s contributions were “transformational,” said Dr. Ronald M. Stewart, professor and chair of surgery at UT Health San Antonio.

“Dr. Pruitt had a major and sustained international impact on the fields of surgery, burn care, trauma and critical care,” Stewart said.

Beneficiaries of that research have included South Texas oil field workers, soldiers injured in the war zone and Gov. Greg Abbott, who was treated at BAMC after a vacation accident in 2016 that left second- and third-degree burns on his lower legs and feet.

Their chances of survival today are high, but it was a different story when Pruitt started out.

“In those days, in many places, it was said you could find your way to the burn center just by the smell of rotting flesh,” Pruitt recalled last year.

Pruitt was was born in Nyack, N.Y., and moved to Dallas when he was in the ninth grade. His father, Basil A. Pruitt, worked in the oil and gas industry and moved every few years. After graduating from Oak Cliff High School in Dallas, he earned a degree in geology at Harvard College in 1952. He met his wife, Molly, who was enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, while he pursued a master’s in geology, which he quit to enter medical school at Tufts.

The couple came to San Antonio in 1959 after he was drafted while doing his residency at Boston City Hospital. Pruitt liked BAMC so much, he decided to re-enter the Army — as long as the Army let him return to the burn center.

San Antonio had only 588,000 people then. Pruitt was warned not to visit the River Walk after dark.

“It was like coming to the boondocks,” Molly Pruitt said of trading Boston for “a big small town” with few cultural options. “It had its first ballet that came to San Antonio, and every parent brought their little daughter. It was funny because there were so many little children.

“They had a good opera, but other than that, the cultural aspect down here was, how do I put it, there wasn’t much of it,” she said. “The town wasn’t sophisticated like it is now.”

On ExpressNews.com: At 88, San Antonio’s ‘father of burn care’ isn’t stopping

Basil Pruitt threw himself into his work and for a time went to war, serving from 1967-68 as chief of surgery and chief of professional services at the busiest evacuation hospital in Vietnam. He became chief of trauma research there, studying cardiopulmonary responses to injury in combat casualties.

He returned home to command the ISR during the conflict, which saw the worst-injured troops brought in by critical care air transport flights staffed with surgeons. ISR teams moved 824 burn patients on 103 flights from Japan to San Antonio from April 1967 to December 1972.

Only one died en route.

“Under his leadership, we partnered with the Air Force to fly around and pick up burn victims from all kinds of places, and if you think about it, it foretold the kind of care in the air … this last 16 years of war, (that was) so effective,” said Peake, the former VA secretary. “We practiced that with burn patients.”

Discovering that leaving a needle or catheter in a vein too long leads to life-threatening infections that can reach organs, Pruitt and other ISR researchers countered the problem by changing intravenous lines more frequently. Perhaps even more important, however, was the development of topical creams that proved to be effective anti-microbial therapy.

That included Sulfamylon, which was developed at the ISR.

“If you started Sulfamylon therapy immediately upon admission of the burn patient, you decreased that incidence of invasive burn wound infection by 50 percent,” Pruitt said, adding that it also controlled the density of bacteria in dead tissue so it could be more safely removed.

Molly Pruitt was elected to the board of North East Independent School District in 1984 and served 24 years. When Roosevelt High School was renovated, the school’s library was named for her.

In a lengthy interview last year, Basil Pruitt appeared to be ambivalent about leaving medicine altogether to do something else, such as write his memoir. It was an old habit. He retired from ISR in 1995 at the end of a 35-year Army career and became a professor at UT Health San Antonio, continuing to conduct research and write papers.

Pruitt was preparing for a conference last summer as second vice president of the American College of Surgeons when asked if he was ready to shut down his offices at BAMC and University Hospital.

“Yeah, yeah, I could do that,’” he replied without much conviction.

Echoing Cancio, the burn center’s civilian director, Molly Pruitt said her husband had indeed wondered if there wasn’t more for him to do and that deep down he couldn’t bear to retire.

“He thought he was never doing enough,” she said.

Cancio once made patient rounds at BAMC under Pruitt.

“He combined scientific rigor with total dedication to the care of patients, who, when he got started, were widely regarded as unsalvageable,” Cancio said. “He was a personal mentor and warm friend to me and many others. He has set the standard for us to follow, but there will never be another Basil Pruitt.”