Multiply My Hands: The Life of Dr. Richard Smith

Richard Alfred Smith was born during the Great Depression with a twisted foot and a future no one could yet see. When his father Julius died just five months later, his mother, Mabel, was left to work her hands raw cleaning other people’s homes to support Richard and his older brother, Julius, Jr. From these humble beginnings came a life that would stretch across continents and touch the lives of millions. 

Richard’s path was never straightforward. Growing up between Institute, West Virginia, and Norwalk, Connecticut, he navigated years filled with hardship, wonder, and contradiction. Music and church pews offered refuge, as did the unexpected embrace of Manfred B. Lee, half of the famed mystery duo Ellery Queen, who became a father figure and opened Richard’s eyes to a wider world. During a college mission trip to a rural clinic in Mayarí, Cuba, his true calling emerged: the idea of multiplying his hands. 

That phrase became Richard’s compass, guiding him through medical school at Howard University, past Harvard’s rejection, into the U.S. Public Health Service, and across the Atlantic to Nigeria as one of the first Peace Corps doctors. From these experiences came his revolutionary vision: MEDEX, a groundbreaking new profession delivering primary care where doctors were scarce or overworked. Richard understood that training others, rather than treating patients himself, was the best way to reach those who needed care most. That insight, born in a Cuban clinic, would eventually transform into something extraordinary when fifteen returning Vietnam War medics became the first to test his approach. 

Richard’s gift wasn’t just vision—it was knowing how to gather the right people and let them shine. From Hawaii, he built the MEDEX Group, an international team that operated between 1972 and 1992. These doctors, educators, and specialists became what they called their “ohana,” a Hawaiian word meaning chosen family. Together, they created the 35-volume, 7,000-page MEDEX Primary Health Care Series, used in over 80 countries and translated into 33 languages. It continues to guide healthcare training in some of the world’s most underserved places and serves as a model for culturally adaptive medical education. 

Yet Richard’s story transcends medical innovation. A Black man born into an era of segregation, he navigated a world designed to exclude him, transforming obstacles into opportunities. His journey spans jazz clubs and field hospitals, chocolate mousse and tropical diseases, operating rooms in Nigeria and boardrooms in Geneva. At every turn, he broke new ground, summoned courage when others counseled caution, and shattered barriers that had seemed impenetrable. 

This remarkable life deserves a complete telling. In 2016, MEDEX Northwest published “Multiply My Hands: Dr. Richard Smith and the Founding of MEDEX Northwest,” which focused on how the program began at the University of Washington. That work told the origin story. What follows is Richard’s complete biography, drawn from extensive research and previously unavailable interviews and archives. 

We present this meticulously researched history through immersive narrative, placing you inside moments that shaped his life. Drawing from the Dr. Richard Smith Archives, which include drafted memoirs, diaries, personal notes, correspondence, published works, interview transcripts, speeches, presentations, television scripts, and musical compositions, we tell Richard’s story as he might have told it. When we include dialogue or describe his thoughts, we draw from the historical record. Our narrative choices never sacrifice accuracy for drama. 

Whether in the Cuban clinic that changed his life’s direction in 1951, or helping write healthcare as a human right into South Africa’s new constitution in 1993, Richard never stopped asking: How can I multiply my hands? This biography seeks to answer that question while making you feel what Richard felt as he moved through the world: his wonder, his frustration, his joy, and his unshakeable belief that healthcare could reach everyone, everywhere. 

Walk beside Dr. Richard Smith. See what he saw. Feel what he felt. Witness how he turned limitation into purpose and multiplied his hands so others could heal.