Charles Edwin Horton, a plastic surgeon and founder of the international humanitarian group Physicians for Peace, died Monday in Suffolk, Va. He was 81.

Horton was a pioneer in the field of genital reconstruction and also specialized in correcting congenital deformities. He founded Eastern Virginia Medical School’s plastic surgery division.

But it was a medical mission to Haiti in the 1960s through his Rotary Club that changed his life. In 1989 he founded Physicians for Peace, a nonprofit group that organizes teams of volunteer medical professionals to train their counterparts in underdeveloped countries.

Last year, the group went on 52 missions and donated more than $25 million in medical supplies and more than $2 million in medical services.

Horton retired from private practice in 2000 to work full-time with Physicians for Peace.

Dr. Eid B. Mustafa, a Physicians for Peace board of trustees member who practices in Wichita Falls, Texas, said Horton trained generations of plastic surgeons from all over the world.

“But he also realized that medicine is not everything, and to help people further, he realized that one has to address the big picture,” Mustafa said.

Horton was born on June 27, 1925 in Purdy, Missouri. He received his medical degree from the University of Virginia, completed his surgical residency at George Washington University Hospital and also trained during the Korean War at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. It was there that Horton discovered his calling to plastic surgery.