Matthew H. Liang

He is the author of History of the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital for Incurables: The First Teaching Hospital in America Specializing in Rheumatic and Orthopedic Conditions, and co-author (with Edward R. Lew) of Halsted R. Holman and the Struggle for the Soul of Medicine (2022).

In 1977 Liang was recruited to build a new NIH multipurpose arthritis center program at the old Robert Brigham Hospital and as a founding member of the new Division of Primary Care and General Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham by K. Frank Austen, H. R. Nesson and Eugene Braunwald. The center became focused on population-based research and pursued several lines of etiologic and methodologic research.

After Johns Hopkins, he went to Dartmouth Medical School and Harvard Medical School, where he earned his MD in 1969. After house staff training at the University of Minnesota and a locum in the Grenfell Mission, he studied tropical public health and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, earning a MPH in 1972. Afterwards, on the Harvard Medical Service at the Boston City Hospital with the encouragement of Dr. Charles Davidson, he spent part of his residency as the founding internist of a neighborhood health center in Roxbury and worked with Roger Mark, a champion for inner city patients. Mark and Liang developed a Nursing Home Telemedicine system for over 400 residents of five nursing homes and showed that nurse practitioners could provide effective, economic care.

Liang was born in California but grew up in Guangzhou, China. A relative of Liang Qichao and Liang Sicheng, his grandfather originally migrated from the farming village of Jianlong 见龙 , Xinhui District in the province of Guangdong. His father, Ping Yee Liang, graduated from the first western-styled medical school, the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College in a class of 15 . His mother, Alice Kao, attended NYU Nursing School, and became head nurse in the newborn nursery at Johns Hopkins Hospital where she met Ping Yee. The family returned to China, but then fled in 1949 by truck to Macau and then Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States. He attended public schools and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, leaving before graduation to go to Johns Hopkins University.