San Francisco General Hospital’s general medical clinic will be named for Dr. Richard H. Fine, a motorcycle-riding physician whose strong social conscience led him to sue the city over his concerns about inadequate health care for jail inmates and often put him at odds with the medical establishment.

He also spent 40 years dedicated to treating the patients who came to San Francisco General and, in 1970 there, created one of the first outpatient clinics at a public hospital in the U.S.

Dr. Fine knew the clinic would bear his name, but didn’t live long enough to see the sign with his name put up. He died Nov. 10, about a year after he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He was 75.

At San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, Dr. Fine served as chief of the adult health center for 25 years and helped found a primary care residency program to train doctors to work with poor and vulnerable patients. He was known for caring for patients many others didn’t want to treat, for his strong sense of moral justice, which sometimes rubbed his colleagues the wrong way — and for his offbeat fashion sense.

“He wasn’t an ideologue. He was someone passionately committed to taking care of people. That was his politics, and that was his work,” said Jim Larson, a San Francisco attorney and longtime friend at a celebration of Dr. Fine’s life this month.

In August, the city’s health commission voted to rename the General Medicine Clinic at San Francisco General the Richard H. Fine People’s Clinic. The concept of the outpatient clinic was that if patients had a place to go to seek early treatment, their health would be maintained so they wouldn’t have to keep returning to the hospital for overnight stays.

“What’s bizarre is that nobody else had ever done it,” said Dr. Fine, in an interview in late August.

Dr. Fine’s work focused on caring for the poor, the homeless, those with AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, and the incarcerated. In 1974, he founded the country’s first medical and psychiatric clinic to treat jail inmates.

He said he simply saw needs that had to be fulfilled. “I was able to use S.F. General and UCSF as a springboard for demonstrating new ways of care,” he said.

Dr. Fine grew up in Cincinnati and graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., as well as Cornell’s medical school in Manhattan. He moved to San Francisco in 1966 to start his residency at the General.

During the civil rights movement, he became the official physician for the Black Panthers, traveling to secret locations in Chicago, New York and other places to take care of activists that other doctors refused to treat. He set up the Black Man’s Free Clinic in Oakland and ran a clinic for the American Indians when they occupied Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971.

His activism placed him at key points in history, such as the disastrous 1969 Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, in which a concert goer was killed by a Hells Angel member hired to provide security and three others died accidentally. Dr. Fine was at the concert as part of a volunteer medical crew.

His unconventional life is recounted in an hour-long documentary made this year by colleagues called “The Biker with a Moral Compass,” which Dr. Fine saw in a special screening at the hospital in May.

Dr. Dean Schillinger, chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at the General, made the film in honor of his friend and mentor. He described Dr. Fine’s passion for riding motorcycles as a metaphor for how he lived: “Head down, throttle on high, full-speed ahead, often against all odds, but always to do the right thing and to go to the right place.”

One day in 1974, Dr. Fine drove Kathleen Campbell, a young hospital secretary who would become an attorney, home on his motorcycle and the two were together ever since. The couple married in 1981 and had identical twin girls, Lynn and Sarah, now 32.

His daughters said their father managed to balance his busy professional life with his family, and was always there for them. Even as his health was deteriorating, he traveled to Argentina in March for the wedding of Sarah, who works as a project director for UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General.

At her father’s memorial gathering, Sarah Fine spoke directly to her father, telling him he was “so loved and admired, yet you’re the only person I knew who could truly care less what other people thought of you.”

Lynn Fine, a public policy consultant, spoke to her dad as well: “In your honor dad, I’ll try to care less about what other people think of me and focus my energies on treating those who are often looked down upon with the love and kindness that they deserve.”

An official ceremony renaming the clinic in Dr. Fine’s honor will occur early in 2016.

In addition to his wife and daughters, Sarah and Lynn, all of whom live in San Francisco, Dr. Fine is survived by his brother and his wife, Jerry and Sally Fine, of Darien, Conn.; and a third daughter, Felicia Fine, of Oakland.

Donations in his name may be made to the Richard H. Fine Fund through San Francisco General Hospital Foundation’s website at https://sfghf.org/support-us/donate.

Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver

‘The Biker

and the Moral

Compass’

To see the film about Dr. Richard Fine’s life: http://bit.ly/1leidZa.