MS Speaks

Dr. Quentin Young was my family's doctor between 1962 and 1977.  He was a remarkable person--so remarkable that he even merited an obituary article in the Lancet (November 19, 2016):

OBITUARY:  QUENTIN DAVID YOUNG

by Geoff Watts

Physician and activist in US health reform. He was born in Chicago, IL, USA, on Sept 5, 1923, and died in Berkeley, CA, USA, on March 7, 2016, aged 92 years.

Although a physician by occupation, Quentin Young was by nature a campaigner. His friend and colleague Margie Schaps reckons that over the course of his working life he must have started some 15 different campaigning organisations. Schaps herself is the Executive Director of one of them, the Chicago based Health and Medicine Policy Research Group (HMPRG). “In Chicago Quentin was the leader of the progressive movement for health-care access for all people, and for reforming health systems and improving the health of the poor and vulnerable”, she says.

But not all of Young's causes and campaigns were medical. “He was about equity and justice in everything”, Schaps continues. “He would tell a story about going down to North Carolina where his grandparents lived when he was little, and seeing other young boys, African American usually, working 12 or 15 hour days in the tobacco fields in the heat of the summer. He knew this wasn't fair.” This awareness of racial and economic injustice stayed with and eventually politicised Young. He became a doctor simply because at school he was good at science, and he wanted a job in which he could be useful. Having qualified in medicine it was then natural that health care should engage much of his urge to foster social and political change. But his considerable energy was also expended on a range of other issues.

Born to Russian and Lithuanian immigrant parents he grew up on Chicago's South Side, served in the military during World War 2, graduated in medicine from Northwestern University Medical School in 1947, and then began his career in internal medicine at what was then Cook County Hospital, also in Chicago. “Quentin was deeply rooted in Chicago, in the people of Chicago, the rough and tumble of the politics of Chicago, and in the labour, civil rights and the anti-war movements”, according to Gordon Schiff who worked with him for many years at Cook County. Now Associate Director of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Harvard Medical School, Schiff talks of the effect that knowing Young has had on his life. “My whole career and that of many other young doctors of my generation was shaped by Quentin's influence”, he says.

It was the restless energy Young brought to his campaigning that was so infectious. It began in the 1950s when he attacked discriminatory practices in Chicago hospitals; he followed it in the 1960s by co-founding the Medical Committee for Human Rights. In the 1980s there was the single-payer health insurance advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program. That decade also saw the emergence of HMPRG, of which Young was still President when he died. Although he numbered Martin Luther King and Barack Obama among his patients, it was to the less well-endowed at Cook County Hospital to whom he devoted his greatest loyalty. He'd returned there in the 1970s after a period at the University of Illinois Medical Center. A public hospital, Cook County was in a poor state in those days, and local politicians were minded to close it. Young helped to found a Committee to Save Cook County Hospital. Its view prevailed and the hospital was not only saved from closure but, in due course, rebuilt. Young's relations with its governing body were often strained. At one point, and while he was Chair of its Department of Medicine, the hospital's junior doctors went on strike over the quality of the care on offer. “Quentin was accused of siding with the doctors”, Schiff recalls. “He was fired a couple of times”. On one occasion, according to Schaps, “some of the hospital's residents and interns removed the door to his office to prevent the County Board from locking him out of it”. Young, always a fighter, managed to get himself rehired.

“He was the most optimistic person I have ever met”, says Schaps. “He saw hope everywhere. If we went to rally and there were ten people there he'd say, ‘Great. Ten people. We can build on it’. The glass was always half full for Quentin.” Schiff agrees: “He was indefatigable. Endless ideas and energy and schemes and strategies.” No sooner had one battle been fought than Young was eager for the next. Struggle for him was not so much tiring as invigorating. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.