Fine advocates for poor, politically isolated

Health Care Heroes

As a politically engaged physician, Richard Fine doesn’t just advocate for universal health rights. He’s dedicated his life’s work to advancing the cause.

“I’ve always felt that health care was a right and that this country was phenomenally backward in not giving it – which it still hasn’t done,” said Fine, 71, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital. He laughs that he “tried to stay off the front pages of the paper and do things quietly, but that didn’t work at all.”

In the 1960s, with then-Senator Ted Kennedy’s support, Fine started the country’s first medical and psychiatric program to treat inmates in a San Francisco jail. He argued that a jail population constituted a community and therefore required a community health center.

During that era, he also served as a doctor for vilified communities no one else would treat. He was the official physician of the Black Panthers (Fine was one of the few people allowed into isolation prison cells of political activists Angela Davis and Bobby Seale). He ran a clinic for the American Indian Movement when it occupied Alcatraz, and tended to injured Indian protestors during their standoff at Wounded Knee. And as the spokesperson for the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Fine treated students injured during the five-month-long strike in support of equal access to public education and more minority faculty at S.F. State University in 1968, the longest student demonstration in U.S. history.

Fine got interested in medicine as a child growing up in Cincinnati during the 1950s, when he followed one of his father’s physician friends on rounds to see patients. As a medical student he was adventurous: He spent six months in Peru doing malaria studies in the Amazon, and he once hitchhiked from Tangiers to Cairo, where he briefly worked.

It was at Cornell’s medical school where Fine’s political interests ignited; drawn to the Civil Rights movement, he went on freedom marches in the South and demonstrated against segregation in Massachusetts and Maryland.
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With a clear focus early on, he said, “I felt it was extremely important not only to be good at what I did, but to be very good at what I did.”

At San Francisco General Hospital Fine served as medical chief for 25 years during which, in the 1980s, he started the Primary Care Medical Residency to train doctors in working with urban poor and vulnerable populations.

“People said, ’You’ll never succeed, the smart people want to be specialists,’ but we were successful and that was really exciting,” he said.

Fine is a professor emeritus at UCSF. The recipient of the UCSF Elliot Rapaport Award in 2010, Fine works in substance abuse treatment and said he remains guided by “my empathy with patients, my understanding of patients.”

“He’s a very interesting and intelligent guy who affected a lot of people,” said Morrie Schambelan, a UCSF medical professor who’s known Fine since the 1960s. “San Francisco tends to attract people who are committed to the mission. Dick would be at the very pinnacle of that, one of the figureheads of the last three or four decades.”