HOUSTON -- Dr. Ralph Feigin, physician-in-chief at Texas Children's Hospital, died Thursday afternoon from lung cancer. He was 70-years-old.

Considered one of the nation's foremost pediatricians, Feigin made Texas Children's Hospital one of the country's best medical centers dedicated to children's health. He also was responsible for training almost half of the region's pediatricians.

Texas Children's Hospital

Dr. Ralph Feigin

Feigin not only watched health care for children get better; he has been at the forefront of making it happen. Since Feigin arrived 31 years ago, Texas Children's Hospital has gone from treating 15,000 kids a year to half a million.

“When I walk into the (Natal Intensive Care Unit), I say 95 percent of these babies are going to go home healthy,” he said in an 11 News interview in June. “When I started in medicine, there were no NICUs.”

He spent his own childhood in New York City. He went to med school in Boston and remembers what pediatricians could not do in 1963.

“President Kennedy and Jackie had a 4 pound, 5 ounce infant,” he said. “I was in Boston then. That baby could not be saved; today that's nothing”

Feigin recently stepped down from his administrative duties to focus on teaching. He was also physician-in-chief of pediatric services at Ben Taub General Hospital and chief of the pediatric service at The Methodist Hospital.

“If you look at the impact that Dr. Ralph Feigin had on pediatric medicine, his reach extends far beyond a regional basis. He had an impact on pediatrics throughout the United States and even globally,” said Mark A. Wallace, the president and CEO of Texas Children’s Hospital. “He symbolized all the great things about Baylor pediatrics and Texas Children’s.”