Joseph Giordano, the former head of surgery and director of the trauma center at George Washington University Hospital who helped perform lifesaving measures on President Ronald Reagan after he was shot during an assassination attempt in 1981, died June 24, two days after his 84th birthday.

He died at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital of complications from an infection, said his son Christopher Giordano.

Dr. Giordano, a vascular surgeon who had previously worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, joined the staff at GW Hospital in 1976. One of his first responsibilities was to revamp the hospital’s emergency department.

“You don’t know how bad the system was in the 1970s,” he told The Washington Post in 2012. “There was no 911. There were no trained ambulances. There was nothing.”

Drawing on his experience as an Army doctor and from studying other hospitals, including the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Dr. Giordano organized a new trauma unit at GW Hospital.

He oversaw everything from facilities and equipment to ambulance services to staffing and, perhaps most important, procedures to be followed by emergency medical teams. In 1979, the American College of Surgeons certified the unit as a Level I trauma center, providing the highest level of surgical care to trauma patients.

That preparation proved to be crucial when the hospital received perhaps its most urgent case on the afternoon of March 30, 1981. After addressing labor groups, Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton near Dupont Circle at about 2:30 p.m. when six shots were fired in sudden succession.

Several people were wounded and fell to the sidewalk. It was unclear if Reagan had been struck, but Secret Service agent Jerry Parr pushed him into the presidential limousine and climbed in the back seat with him.

Reagan complained of a pain in his chest and had blood on his lips.

Parr then ordered the limousine to proceed to GW Hospital instead of returning to the White House. Less than 10 minutes later, Reagan walked into the emergency room under his own power before falling to the floor. Dr. Giordano was with patients in another part of the hospital when a message went out on the intercom, asking him to report immediately to the trauma unit.

Reagan was lying on gurney when Dr. Giordano first saw him.

“How are you doing, Mr. President?” he asked, according to journalist Del Quentin Wilber’s “Rawhide Down,” a book about the shooting.

“I’m having trouble breathing,” Reagan replied.

When first lady Nancy Reagan was brought into the emergency room by Secret Service agents to see her husband, the onetime Hollywood actor tried to make light of the shooting, saying, “I forgot to duck.”

Working quickly to stabilize the president’s deteriorating condition, Dr. Giordano made an incision in Reagan’s midsection and inserted a plastic tube, which immediately filled from internal bleeding.

“He was seriously injured,” Dr. Giordano told a GWU publication in 1981. “I think he was close to dying.”

He determined that the bleeding was the result of a gunshot wound and asked a colleague, cardiac and thoracic surgeon Benjamin Aaron, to help find the bullet. Before he was given anesthesia, Reagan quipped to the doctors surrounding him, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.”

“Today, we’re all Republicans, Mr. President,” Dr. Giordano said.

Aaron opened Reagan’s chest and searched in vain for the bullet. An X-ray showed that it was flattened and was lodged less than an inch from the heart.

It was later determined that the shot from the .22-caliber pistol of assailant John W. Hinckley Jr. had ricocheted off the presidential limousine and entered Reagan’s body under his left arm.

Aaron removed the bullet from Reagan’s lung, and the surgery was over in two hours. From the time of the shooting, Reagan had lost almost half his blood. He spent 11 days in the hospital and made a full recovery.

Anton Sidawy, Dr. Giordano’s successor as the GW Hospital’s chief of surgery and the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, described Dr. Giordano’s role in Reagan’s emergency treatment as “like a maestro. He was taking the measure of the patient’s injuries, keeping him alive and calling on the experts” for surgery and other needs.

Two other victims of the shooting were brought to GW Hospital that day. Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, who was shot in the abdomen, and White House press secretary James S. Brady, who was shot in the head, were treated by other surgical units. D.C. police officer Thomas K. Delahanty, who was shot in the neck during the attack, was taken to Washington Hospital Center.

All three survived, but Brady had lifelong aftereffects from his wounds and became an advocate for stricter gun safety laws before his death in 2014. A jury in 1982 found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was confined at a St. Elizabeths, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, until his unconditional release in 2022.

Dr. Giordano and other members of the GW medical team were often praised as heroes for saving the president’s life.

“The real hero of the day was actually Jerry Parr, the special agent in charge of security,” Dr. Giordano told an alumni publication of the former Jefferson Medical College, his alma mater. “His decision to bring the president straight to the hospital rather than stopping at the White House - which his motorcade almost did - is the reason the president survived.”

Joseph Martin Giordano, one of two children, was born June 22, 1941, in Jersey City and grew up in the nearby New Jersey communities of Union City and Fort Lee. His father, the son of Italian immigrants, owned a milk delivery service. His mother did office work and helped manage the home.

Dr. Giordano took a bus into Manhattan each day to attend Xavier High School, a Jesuit boys’ school. He played the clarinet in dance bands and performed professionally in his teens.

He was the first person in his family to attend college, graduating from Georgetown University in 1961. He received his medical degree in 1967 from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (now Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University).

During medical school and his residencies in Hartford, GW Hospital and the old D.C. General Hospital, Dr. Giordano went on humanitarian medical missions to Haiti and Honduras. He worked at Walter Reed from 1973 to 1976.

In addition to organizing the trauma center at GW Hospital, Dr. Giordano launched a mobile medical unit that provided mammograms to underserved parts of the District. He wrote hundreds of medical papers, led GW’s surgery department for 18 years and taught hundreds of medical students and residents.

“When you’re a surgeon,” Sidawy said, “you teach when you’re doing rounds, when you go into the operating room. This is what he loved most.”

After retiring in 2010, Dr. Giordano joined the board of Partner for Surgery, a McLean, Virginia-based organization that provides surgical care to thousands of people in rural Guatemala. The group’s founder, Frank Peterson, said Dr. Giordano recruited volunteer surgical teams and helped establish the methods of treatment and care. GWU presents an annual award named for Dr. Giordano to a medical student or resident who exemplifies his humanistic interests.

Reagan often cited Dr. Giordano’s personal story, as a milkman’s son who became a surgeon, as the embodiment of the American Dream. The two men had a long correspondence after Reagan’s stay at the hospital, but Dr. Giordano noted that he was a liberal Democrat who opposed the Reagan administration’s cuts to programs that benefited students and the poor.

“Most of the programs that helped me and most people for the last 40 or 50 years,” he said in 1984, “were enacted by Democrats, and I think we ought to remember that.” That year, he endorsed Reagan’s primary opponent, former vice president Walter Mondale, who lost in a landslide.

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, the former Orfa Munoz, of Washington; three sons, Christopher, Andrew and Michael; and eight grandchildren.

Dr. Giordano recognized that he would always be linked with helping Reagan recover from a near-assassination, “and I’m glad I was there to help,” he said in 2012. “But all over the world, there are countless people in need, and I’d like to be remembered for improving healthcare access and delivery for as many patients as possible.”