Dr. Robert Milch, who gave up a successful surgical practice to devote his career to improving treatment for the dying, Wednesday received the $50,000 Hastings Center Cunniff- Dixon Physician Award for leadership in end-of-life care.

He is the first doctor to receive the new award, which is named for the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in the Hudson Valley, and the Connecticut-based Cunniff- Dixon Foundation, which supports programs to improve care at the end of life.

Milch in 1978 helped found Hospice Buffalo, one of the first organizations in the hospice movement in the United States, and served as its full-time medical director from 1992 until his retirement in 2007.

“When our work has been its finest, together we have seen in those entrusted to our care emergence of the best in human nature — the courage, grace, dignity and love of which one is capable,” he said in his remarks at the Center for Hospice & Palliative Care in Cheektowaga.

At 66, Milch is not slowing down too much. He heads the palliative care unit at Buffalo General Hospital and holds the position of clinical director of the Palliative Care Institute, a new effort by hospice, the University at Buffalo and Veterans Affairs Medical Center to improve the study, teaching and practice of end-of-life care.

The hospice movement, which encourages pain relief and compassionate care for terminally ill patients and their families, was considered a medical backwater when Milch took the director’s job.

Milch, a highly respected physician, immediately raised the organization’s stature. His timing was good, coinciding with the introduction of a Medicare hospice benefit that has encouraged the growth of the field.

He brought with him an inspirational personality that attracted other doctors, and he recognized early on — and promoted to his colleagues — the advances being made in the science of managing pain and other symptoms of dying patients.

“End-of-life care has come out of the closet and has a much more prominent role in health care. It’s very gratifying to see that,” he said.

Milch had been applying the principles of palliative care long before such practices became widespread. He wrote or talked about the need for eliminating the unequal and distant relationship between doctors and their patients, and for taking pain management much more seriously.

Asked about his philosophy of doctoring, he is likely to share one of his favorite quotes from surgeon and writer Richard Selzer: “A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers.”

Among others, he credits the influence of his physician father, who taught him that every doctor should approach his work with a sense of humor, a sense of humility and an incision, meaning a sense of what the patient is going through.

“I know this sounds a bit Pollyannaish. But what happens at the bedside is not just a function of what you know, but what sort of person you are,” he said.

Matthew A. Baxter founded the Cunniff-Dixon Foundation in memory of his wife, Carley Cunniff, who died of breast cancer, and her attending physician, Dr. Peter S. Dixon.

“Few doctors have the natural instincts and compassion of Dr. Milch,” he said.