He was always there, for 27 years, at work in the stolid brick building on a forsaken block in East Baltimore.
"He was our family doctor, the only family doctor we ever had," says Bradley Thomas. "So much of what I remember from my childhood is Dr. Huang."
And so much of what Dr. Shi-Shung Huang remembers is: boys like Bradley Thomas who have grown into successful men, mothers who now send their grandchildren to see him, children who left the projects and went to college and are rearing healthy families.
He is 59 years old now and weakened by lung cancer. This month, Dr. Huang retired from his job as director of the Greater Baltimore Medical Center's Community and Family Health Center, a clinic in the 1000 block of E. Baltimore St.
Over 27 years, he tended to an estimated 55,000 patients, most of them too poor to afford private doctors. Five public housing projects were within walking distance of the clinic.
The people he's left behind talk about the graduations he attended, the money he quietly lent, the food he provided, the summer jobs he got for neighborhood kids.
"I would like to see GBMC name the clinic after him," says Mr. Thomas, now a pharmacist and drug store owner. "Now. Not after he's gone."
Dr. Huang's wife, Margaret, and two sons -- one a doctor, one a lawyer -- look after him now. Three retirement parties have been thrown in his honor, including one at GBMC to which he walked from the hospital bed where he was being nursed for a fever. "Everyone thought I was so weak, but after I listened to 10 people talk, I talked for 17 minutes," he says. "It helps me to talk about my clinic."
Dr. Huang had not intended to spend his career as head of a family clinic. Born in Taiwan, the ninth of 10 children of a father with an elementary school education, Dr. Huang trained at the National Taiwan University School of Medicine and came to the United States as an intern in 1962. In 1963, he arrived in Baltimore for his residency, planning to specialize in pediatric gastroenterology and go into private practice.
But in 1965, as part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, the federal government appropriated funds for community-based clinics for poor children. And GBMC, with help from the Baltimore Health Department, opened the Community and Family Health Center at the site of the old Presbyterian Eye, Ear and Throat Charity Hospital. Dr. Huang was invited to join the staff.
