Dr. Chester W. “Chet” Schmidt Jr.
, former chief of psychiatry at what is now Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and a founder of Chesapeake Physicians, died May 15 of complications from knee replacement surgery at the University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center. The resident of Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County was 89. “He had a gravitas and was easy to talk to and people liked him,” said Dr.
Jimmy Potash, department director and psychiatrist-in-chief and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “He had a steady energy that continued on into his 80s and which he had 40 years earlier. He had been in our Sex and Gender Clinic just a week before he died.
” Kostas G. Lyketsos, director of the Johns Hopkins Bayview Memory and Alzheimer Center, is also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “My first year of my residency he was the department chair and later became my supervisor,” Dr.
Lyketsos said. “He was very focused on results and patient care and brought that to his work. And he brought the same interactions to his duties as an administrator.
” Chester William Schmidt Jr., son of Chester W. Schmidt Sr.
, an IBM executive, and Helen M. Schmidt, a homemaker, was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He was a 1962 graduate of Xavier High School in Manhattan and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 from the Johns Hopkins University, where he also obtained his medical degree in 1960.
He then served.
