Dr. Joseph E. Murray, who opened a new era of medicine with the first successful human organ transplant, died on Monday in Boston. He was 93.

He died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he performed his first transplant, said Tom Langford, a hospital spokesman. The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered on Thursday, Mr. Langford said.

Dr. Murray’s groundbreaking surgical feat came in 1954, when he removed a healthy kidney from a 23-year-old man and implanted it in the man’s ailing identical twin. Dr. Murray went on to pioneer techniques that over the years changed the lives of tens of thousands of patients who received new kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers or other organs after their own had failed.

In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

As director of the Surgical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, which became Brigham and Women’s, Dr. Murray was a leader in the study of transplant techniques, the mechanisms of organ rejection and the use of drugs to thwart it.