Farewell to doctor with a mission and a view on everything

A glance at newspaper headlines from the 1970s and 80s about physician Ding Lik-kiu attests to his ubiquity. The prominent physician campaigned against corruption, drug addiction and price rises by public utilities, and advocated women's right to abortion, workers' rights, democratic reform, environmental protection, population growth and human rights protection.

Ding was known among journalists in the 1970s as 'Dial-a-quote Ding', a man always ready to speak his mind on a wide range of social issues. Ding's high media profile was all the more remarkable in the social and political culture of the time. In an era when only the great and the good aired their views on social issues, Ding grabbed newspaper headlines by attacking social ills and injustices.

Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, an executive councillor and former vice-chairman of the Democratic Party, said Ding was a prominent social reformer. 'There were not many professionals and educated people in those days who bothered to speak out on social issues.'

Ding, who died in San Francisco on Tuesday last week, was born in Sarawak, in what is now Malaysia, in 1921. As an infant, he was due to be sold by his impoverished parents to a rich merchant, but his mother reneged on the deal at the last minute. He studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University in the American city of Baltimore and served as a medical missionary in Borneo, where he helped set up Christ Hospital, for five years before coming to Hong Kong in 1962.

After migrating to Hong Kong, he became a social activist, championing the rights of workers and the underprivileged. His focus on social ills started with drug addiction, one of the city's gravest social problems at the time. He was an experienced narcotics researcher and called for better rehabilitation of addicts. A methadone outpatient scheme, which Ding had advocated since the late 1960s, was set up in 1972 by the Medical Health Department.

His opposition to drugs drove him to campaign the same year to stop the Rolling Stones from performing in Hong Kong because of their past association with drugs.