TUCSON - Dr. Kurt Semm, whose pioneering techniques in minimally invasive surgery were initially ridiculed but led to innovations in many types of operations, died July 16 at his home in Tucson. He was 76.

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his family said.

In the 1960s, Semm, a gynecologist and engineer, began working on laparoscopic surgery, in which no large incision is made. Instead, several tiny incisions are made to insert a scope and instruments. Such operations can greatly reduce costs and the patient's recovery time.

"Someday in the future, people will look back at a regular surgical incision as something archaic and barbaric," Dr. Paul A. Wetter, chairman of the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons, said Friday. "We have Kurt Semm to thank for that."

Semm, who worked in fertility, developed instruments that allowed the uterus to be manipulated without large incisions being made in the abdominal wall. He was helped by his father and brother, who owned the medical instrument company Wisap, Grzegorz S. Litynski wrote in the July-September 1998 issue of the Journal of the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons.

In an interview with Litynski in 1994, Semm described one of his innovations.

"I had a patient from Persia," Semm said. "She had come to have a sterilization done and had a visa for only three days." The woman began bleeding heavily and instead of performing a laparotomy - making an abdominal incision to get to the source of the bleeding - Semm decided to use a Roeder loop, in which an intricate knot was started outside the abdomen, slipped through a tube and tied around the source of the bleeding inside.

"But I had no instrument to get the dumb loop into the abdomen," Semm recalled. "So I improvised, and it worked. It was 1975 or 1976."

By 1977, use of the loop ligature had become routine in such surgery in his clinic.

When Semm presented his inventions at medical meetings, he was often derided as unethical by people who were shocked at how different his new techniques were.

Once, when he was making a slide presentation on ovarian cysts, "suddenly the projector was unplugged, with the explanation that such unethical surgery should not be presented," Dr. Liselotte Mettler, a student of Semm and deputy director of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kiel in Germany, said when she introduced Semm at the 2002 meeting of the Society for Laparoendoscopic Sur- geons.

In 1970, after Semm became the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kiel, his co-workers demanded that he undergo a brain scan because, they said, "only a person with brain damage would perform laparoscopic surgery," Mettler said.

Litynski noted in his 1998 article that "an astonished observer" asked in the Feb. 1, 1980, issue of the Medical Tribune, "When will the first appendix or gallbladder disappear into an endoscope?"

"The first half of this question did not wait long for an answer," Litynski wrote. "On Sept. 13 of the same year, Semm performed the first fully laparoscopic appendectomy." Laparoscopic removal of the gallbladder is also now routine, and his technique for hysterectomy is now called the Semm hysterectomy.

Criticism did not deter Semm. "He was persistent and consistent," said Dr. Jordan Phillips, founder of the American Association for Gynecological Laparoscopy and a friend of Semm.

Ted Sullivan, vice president of Wisap America, said Semm kept developing and improving laparoscopic instruments, estimating the number at more than 1,000.

Kurt Karl Stephan Semm was born on March 23, 1927, in Munich, Germany, to Margarete and Karl Semm. He received his medical degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians University School of Medicine in 1951. A specialist in obstetrics and gynecology, he joined the International Fertility Association in 1953.

He is survived by his wife, Dr. Iseult O'Neill, whom he married in 1994; a daughter, Tara Virginia; a son, Patrick; and a brother, Horst.