Richard Fine was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother, Sylvia Miller Fine, was of Ukrainian/Russian/Lithuanian Jewish descent, and his father, Arthur Fine, was of German Jewish descent.
Sylvia was a homemaker and Arthur ran two movie theaters, the Regal and the Main, in the Over the Rhine section of Cincinnati. Their son Jerry, is two years younger. Richard had a brush with death at age five. A bad case of pneumonia led to his being the first child in Cincinnati to receive penicillin, a substance so precious that it was recovered from his urine. After that “he always wanted to be a doctor,” according to his younger brother, Jerry. Arthur dies in 1955, when Richard was 15 and Jerry 13. It was a watershed moment in both their lives. (quote from Jerry) Richard graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.
He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell College in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in Anthropology and began referring to himself as Dick Fine. He also managed to have his fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, of which he was President, kicked out of the national organization for admitting Negroes and women. He received his M.D. degree from Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. The summer following medical school he volunteered with the Peruvian Health Service (Spanish name on CV), on a boat delivering medical care to indigenous people along the Amazon River in Peru. This experience predates the backcountry journey of Che Guevara when he wrote the journals which became the Motorcycle Diaries. In any event Dick was on course to be an activist physician.
In pursuit of that goal he applied for and was accepted for a residency in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco, where he hoped to be fully engaged in the political movements swirling around the Bay Area in 1966.