Chiu-Chen Wang, specialist on treating head, neck cancer

Dr. Chiu-Chen Wang was a renowned specialist on treating cancer whose sharply pointed witticisms and altered versions of Chinese proverbs were legendary at Harvard Medical School.

After reviewing a new patient's charts, Dr. Wang would gently deliver his prognosis, but would try to lighten the mood by adding, ''See, you're lucky you're here, because I cure cancer," colleagues recalled.

For his more long-term patients, he'd greet them with a ''You're still alive?" asked in feigned wonderment, if he thought they could handle the playful banter.

The quirky, ''highly quotable" radiation oncology specialist died Wednesday in his Lincoln home from kidney failure resulting from prostate cancer. He was 83.

In the area of his specialty -- cancer of the head and neck -- Dr. Wang, ''was probably the top person in the world in the treatment," said Dr. Jay S. Loeffler, chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He impressed many with his abilities to determine the exact intensity of radiation needed to irradiate the cancer long before technology made doing so easier, and had an innate ability to detect the scope of disease in each patient, Loeffler said. He taught his students how to carefully eliminate tumors while keeping surrounding structures intact, warning them, ''Don't burn down the house to kill a mosquito." Another ''CC Wang-ism" he was known to dispense: ''You cannot hit a home run if you do not see the ball."

Being a successful doctor, he would tell students, can be boiled down into three attributes: ''Ability, Availability, and Affability," and indeed he had them all.

Head and neck cancer can be especially fast-growing, so Dr. Wang advocated for a twice-a-day radiation regimen that was highly successful.

He also helped develop a cancer treatment that he wrote about in his textbook ''Radiation Therapy for Head and Neck Neoplasms," and had nearly 200 articles published in medical journals.

Dr. Wang was born in Canton, China, where his father was a Lutheran minister. He went through the Chinese medical school system, before he came to the United States in 1949. After an internship in internal medicine, he conducted his residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

He spent two years in the US Army before becoming a full-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

He accrued a number of prestigious awards, including the 1997 gold medal awarded by the American Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology Therapy, and last month, the CC Wang professorship chair was established at Harvard Medical School.

The longtime Lincoln resident also had a knack for cultivating fruits and vegetables -- he was especially proud of his cantaloupes. He set up speakers in his garden in the hopes that Beethoven's Symphony Number 5 would help the plants grow.

''He was a very simple, unpretentious man, who was not materialistic and he did not wish to possess things," his daughter, Janice Wang Smyth, of Sarasota, Fla., and Montreal said.

''He was a character," Loeffler said. ''He had a tough external stance, but he was a lamb deep down. Just a lovely man."

His wife, Pauline (Chin), died in 2000.

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Wang leaves three brothers, George Wong and Martin Wong, both of San Francisco, and Chiu-Kwong of Wuhan, China; and two sisters, Ya-Li Pan, of Canton, China, and So-Ying Bai of Sian, China.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Jan. 14 in First Parish Church in Lincoln. Internment is in Lincoln Cemetery.