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 in the Army as a captain in the Medical Corps.
He completed his internship and residency in psychiatry at Hopkins and a residency in medicine at Stanford University.
Dr. Schmidt began his long Hopkins career in 1967 when he became an assistant professor in psychiatry and assistant director of clinical care at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic.
During his early years at Hopkins, he was director of student mental health and assistant director of the suicidology training program.
In 1971, he helped establish the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit, which managed patients with sexual dysfunction, gender identity issues or psychosexual disorders.
He was named chief of psychiatry in 1972 at the old Baltimore City Hospitals, which is now Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, a position he held until 2006.
Dr. Schmidt also was a founder of Chesapeake Physicians, a faculty practice plan — a way for faculty to treat patients at academic medical centers — that became a national model and served as its president for 23 years.
“He helped integrate Bayview, which had been known as the Francis Scott Key Medical Center for a time and which we called ‘Key West,’ into the Hopkins Broadway campus in 1982,” Dr. Lyketsos said. “He had made the department at Bayview into a nationally ranked facility.”
In a note announcing Dr. Schmidt’s death, Dr. Potash called him “one of the longtime pillars of our department’s success.”
His research interests included suicidology, with a specialization in driver deaths from single-car accidents.
After a seven-year study of men and women drivers, Dr. Schmidt concluded that it was personality and not necessarily alcohol that resulted in automobile accidents, specifically aggressive macho personalities.
“It’s the personality traits that result in a person who has many problems in living, including use and abuse of alcohol when driving,” he told The Evening Sun in a 1975 interview.
“In slightly over 200 accidents we only found three suicides,” he explained.
From 2003 until 2019 when he retired, he was chief medical director of Johns Hopkins HealthCare.
In 2012, he was given an award for his life’s work from the Maryland Psychiatric Society.
Dr. Schmidt’s youthful look persisted until well into his 80s
“He had quite a terrific bearing and always dressed in bow ties and suits,” Dr. Lyketsos said. “He did not have a very loud voice, but everyone wanted to hear what Chet had to say.”
A resident of Gibson Island since the early 1970s, Dr. Schmidt enjoyed fly-fishing in Montana’s Yellowstone River and Spruce Creek in Pennsylvania.
He also enjoyed tennis, golfing and windsurfing “followed by a cocktail or two, which was Chet’s definition of a perfect day,” according to a family biography.
A reception celebrating his life will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. July 10 at the Gibson Island Club at 534 Broadwater Way.
Plans for an additional celebration of his life to be held at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in the autumn are incomplete.
He is survived by two daughters, Magge Sollers, of Gibson Island, and Eliza Dunn, of Lutherville; and four grandchildren. Two marriages ended in divorce.