Like Father, Like Son

Tradition is perhaps one of the words most often used when describing St. Luke’s. In its 150-year history, St. Luke’s has been home to husband and wife doctors, brothers, daughters and fathers and sons. All carrying on the traditions that have made St. Luke’s much more than the sum of its bricks and mortar parts.

“My father was my role model as a doctor,” says William (Bill) Liaw, DO, speaking about the late Michael Liaw, MD, a general surgeon who had spent much of his medical career at what is now St. Luke’s Miners Campus.

The younger Dr. Liaw carries his father’s iconic, black medicine bag and a mental image of him whenever he goes to his office or to visit patients. They are his loving homage to the man who played a huge role in his son’s decision to follow him as the second doctor in the Liaw family.

“Dad blazed the trail for me to go into medicine,” says Dr. Liaw, a family medicine physician with St. Luke’s Macungie Medical Group and a lead physician at St Luke’s comprehensive, one-day ExecuHealth program for busy executives.

“He had a great work ethic, and his were big shoes to fill.”

The bonds between fathers and sons are often forged through teaching, casual interaction and role modeling, as Dr. Liaw knows.

He recalls when he and his sister accompanied their father to Coaldale State Hospital—now St. Luke’s Miners Campus—back in the 1970s and ‘80s. Dr. Michael Liaw, in solo practice, and one of the Tamaqua area’s first Asian doctors, often went to see patients when they couldn’t get to the hospital or his office. Young Bill and his sister went along sometimes, too.

“He was an ‘old time’ doctor, a generalist who also did orthopedic, OB/GYN and plastic surgery. He took call every night, treated emergencies and never complained,” says his son. He also wanted to earn the trust of the Schuylkill County community coming in from the outside.

“I admired him immensely.”

Dr. Bill Liaw became a doctor in 1994 and started in a private family medicine practice in Macungie in 1997. Today, he extends the long-time family tradition of caring for the sick and injured at St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN). Like his father, he thrives on the patient interactions, the variety of medical conditions he treats and the chance to do minor surgical procedures in the office.

“I love doing them,” he says, something else he likely inherited from his father. He removes skin lesions and cysts and performs outpatient cosmetic procedures.

“I might have gone into surgery, but I was too intimidated by my father’s success,” offers the 53-year-old primary care physician.

Michael Liaw, MD, was a giant of a skilled doctor, greatly respected and accomplished in Schuylkill County and at St. Luke’s Miners, says Micah Gursky, director of business relations and government relations at the Coaldale hospital, who knew the elder Dr. Liaw well.

“He supported this hospital through some difficult years before we joined St. Luke’s in 2000,” Gursky says. “He left us too soon.”

The elder Dr. Liaw’s medical career began in his native Taiwan, where he graduated from medical school. He came to Pennsylvania for a residency, intending to return to Taiwan, then met and married a German-American nurse, Judith Artz, in Pottsville at Good Samaritan Hospital.

They went to New York and Reading for his surgery residency and later settled in Northern Pennsylvania, where they started a family and he built his medical practice, which he maintained throughout his career.

“He loved medicine and he loved the St. Luke’s Miners Campus,” says his son.

Dr. Liaw retired from St. Luke’s Miners in 2004, after 30 years in practice at the hospital and in the community. His son believes his father might never have left the profession if not for his own medical problems, which led to his death in 2009 at age 75.

By then, his son’s medical practice in Macungie had joined SLUHN in 2011. In addition to treating patients there, he performs executive physicals and health screenings for ExecuHealth program at the Anderson Campus, something that gives him great satisfaction. “I enjoy being able to spend an entire day with a patient,” he explains enthusiastically.

Though, at age 53, he’s admittedly “on the back nine of my medical career,” to borrow a golf metaphor, Dr. Liaw is proud of his skills as a doctor and optimistic at St. Luke’s strategy for growing its service area.

“I think they’ve done a fantastic job,” he comments.

He and his family have contributed generously to St. Luke’s Miners Campus through two major donations in memory of his father.

“He cared deeply for the hospital and for the underserved rural community there,” says Bill Liaw. “He would want it to thrive.”

He and his wife, Amy, a realtor, are parents of a 4-year-old daughter born at St. Luke’s Allentown Campus. “She’s the light of my life,” says her proud father.

And if past is prologue, she might be the future of the Liaw family at St. Luke’s. Whether she chooses to become a physician, nurse or any other healthcare professional, Dr. Liaw says he’ll

be supportive and proud of his cherished child, as would her grandfather. No doubt the black doctor’s bag would become hers to carry on the family tradition 40+ year tradition.

“All my life, I aspired to have my father’s approval and to make a difference like he did,” adds his son. “I think he’d be proud of me.”