Dr. Eric M. Fine, a retired pediatrician and Baltimore County Health Department official, died of complications from a fall May 13 at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
The Mount Washington resident was 82. Karl Fugelso, a professor of art history at Towson University, was both a friend and Dr. Fine’s teacher.
“I had known Dr. Fine for years socially before he took my courses, and I always found him to be a warm, thoughtful empathetic man who undoubtedly brought not only a keen mind and much learning to his patients but also a wonderful bedside manner,” Mr. Fugelso wrote in an email.
“Warm, funny, kind, thoughtful, centered, and inquisitive, he was the whole package, a true Renaissance mensch in an era when we could use, but are not likely to find, many more like him,” he wrote. Eric Michael Fine, son of David Fine, a gas station owner, and Gertrude Fine, a secretary, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and when he was a toddler, the family moved to Mount Rainier, near Hyattsville, Prince George’s County. He was a graduate of Northwestern High School in Adelphi and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.
C., where he obtained an associate’s degree in 1963. “He never earned a bachelor’s degree and entered the University of Maryland Medical School on a full tuition scholarship,” said his wife of 54 years, Ricky Scherl, who retired as director of major gifts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“He was brilliant, a vi.