In a hospital in Lviv in March 2023, an 82-year-old surgeon from Little Rock lifted a mass of blood vessels about the size of a fist out of a baby's neck saving the nerves around it. Dr. James Suen, who led the otolaryngology department at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences for 43 years and counted President Bill Clinton among his patients, died on November 4, 2026, in Little Rock. He was 86.

That week in Lviv, recounted by UAMS News, opened a late calling. Between 2023 and 2025 he made five surgical missions to Ukraine, working with the Dallas-based LEAP Global Missions and the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine, operating on children born with deformities and on soldiers with devastating facial wounds, and teaching Ukrainian surgeons as he went. "Since the war started, I have been watching and trying to understand," he said after the Lviv trip. "I was seeing the horrors of the war, and I always felt I wanted to do something to help Ukraine."

Operating was not enough for him. In early 2025 he brought Yuri Chepurnyi, a maxillofacial surgeon and professor in Kyiv whom he had worked beside, to Little Rock for about a month of training in free-flap reconstruction, the microsurgery that moves bone and tissue from elsewhere in the body to rebuild a face. Suen told UAMS News he knew of only one surgeon in Kyiv who could perform it. Rudi Myhovych, a Ukrainian physician and friend, later wrote of one of Suen's operations there: "That day changed how many of our doctors see what's possible." In 2026, according to the family's notice on Legacy.com, he received the Order of Saint Panteleimon, which his family described as Ukraine's highest public recognition for service in medicine.

The road to Lviv started in Dermott, in southeast Arkansas, where he was born on October 9, 1940, one of nine children of Chinese immigrant grocers. He arrived while federal law still shut out Chinese immigrants, and he and the siblings able to enroll were the only students of color in their schools. The family store sold to everyone, extending credit to sharecroppers and to people of Japanese descent interned in camps nearby. His first job, at five, was keeping watch over the candy. "I think I ate more than I sold," he said of it.

Medicine was not the plan. In college he stopped at a car wreck and helped pull people from the vehicle, and he was shaken enough to tell his sister Laura, a nurse. She suggested he become a doctor. He protested that he was too nervous and too dumb, and she answered, "I know you, and you could become one of those nervous and dumb doctors." From the University of Texas at Austin he went on to a medical degree from the University of Arkansas in 1966, an internship at San Francisco General Hospital, and two years as an Air Force captain during the Vietnam War. He had hoped to follow a mentor, a pioneer of heart surgery in Arkansas, into cardiac work. When that mentor died of head and neck cancer, Suen changed course.

Back at UAMS he was one of the first two residents in its new otolaryngology program, then the first otolaryngologist accepted into the head and neck fellowship at M.D. Anderson in Houston. He came home in 1974 and, at 33, took charge of the university's otolaryngology division. He stayed at the head of it until May 1, 2017, a 43-year run UAMS believes is the longest of any otolaryngology chair in the country. With Kent Westbrook, a colleague since both were medical students, he co-founded the Arkansas Cancer Research Center, now the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, and directed it from 2002 to 2007. He wrote or edited six textbooks, among them Cancer of the Head and Neck, edited with Eugene Myers of Pittsburgh. He served as president of the American Head and Neck Society and trained more than a hundred residents and fellows.

Some of his patients had famous voices. He traveled with Bill Clinton through the 1992 campaign and kept caring for him in the White House years. "Your work with me throughout the 1992 campaign saved my voice and helped me get elected president," Clinton said in a video tribute in October 2026. His family's notice also names actor Roy Scheider, country singer Charley Pride and Walmart co-founder Sam Walton as patients, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones as a close friend. Patients without famous names got his personal phone number, and some slept in the family guest room. He kept 70-hour weeks into his 80s, and the question of when he would retire became a standing joke among everyone who knew him.

On October 29, 2026, six days before he died, a standing-room-only crowd at UAMS turned out for his Last Lecture, a talk the university usually gives a retiring professor. He had asked for Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" as he came in, so the room would know he loved them. Gresham Richter, whom he had mentored for more than two decades and who now chairs the department, read the lessons Suen had prepared, among them this one: "Don't forget that one person's encouragement can change generations of lives." Then Suen took the microphone himself. "I felt this would not only be the last lecture to recognize me, but to thank you all," he said, as reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

He is survived by his wife, Karen; his children Brent, Tiffany, Brad and Brennan; his grandchildren Sophia, Vivian, Ethan and Violet, to whom he was Papa; and his sisters Mary and Judy. His first wife, Carol Gee, died before him. The family asked that gifts in his memory go to the UAMS Department of Otolaryngology.

The things he made are still in use. The department he took over as a 33-year-old division head now has an endowed chair in his name. The cancer institute in Little Rock grew from the research center he and Westbrook started. Cancer of the Head and Neck, now through four editions, became a reference used by medical schools worldwide, more than a hundred surgeons carry his training, and a Kyiv surgeon he chose himself went home in 2025 ready to rebuild wounded soldiers' faces and to teach others to do the same.