July 4, 2004
News Observer, North Carolina
By VICKI CHENG, Staff Writer
Dr. Wes Wallace thinks we need cleaner air. He’s in favor of nuclear disarmament. And he thinks all people, even the impoverished, deserve decent health care.
But the UNC-Chapel Hill emergency room doctor does more than just talk about these ideals.
“He’s the physician, I think, that we all want to be, and aspire to be,” says Dr. Judith Tintinalli, who heads the department of emergency medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Wallace is preparing to leave late this week for a two-week trip to the rural community of Bongo, Panama, near the Costa Rican border. There he will lead a team of volunteer health-care providers who will treat children for malnutrition and intestinal parasites. They will provide blood-pressure medicine to adults who make $4 or $5 a day and can’t afford the drugs. They will examine people who bring their children in on horseback or come in on foot.
Wallace will also take small gifts to John Wesley Gonzales, who is named for him. He delivered the baby on a folding table one evening six years ago as the clinic was closing for the day.
This will be Wallace’s sixth trip to Panama to provide free health care, through a group organized by the University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill. The volunteers pay about $1,500 each. They sleep in a church dormitory or a basic hotel in a nearby town, where they count themselves lucky to have hot water.
“I guess at this point, I either have to go or I have to find someone else to go,” Wallace says. “They’re expecting us.”
Wallace, 56, grew up in Gainesville, Texas. His father was a doctor. “Growing up, I saw that he had a pretty tough life,” Wallace says. “I didn’t think I wanted to be a physician.”
So when it was time for Wallace to go to college at Texas Tech University, he studied speech and theater. He worked as a disc jockey. He thought about broadcast journalism. But he wound up at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. There he volunteered as a chaplain intern in the emergency department of an Oakland hospital that treated many indigent patients. And he was hooked.
“I find it enormously interesting and exciting,” Wallace says of emergency medicine. “It is frequently a very direct way to make people’s lives better, or to save people’s lives. … I am frequently tired, but I am never bored. Something interesting or exciting is always happening.”
In the 1980s, it seemed to Wallace that one of the most pressing issues on the planet was the possibility of nuclear war. In 1989, he became president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a national organization that promotes policies to protect people from weapons of mass destruction. It is an affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
“One of the main reasons that I became a physician was to make life better for people, to help people enjoy the full measures of their lives, and to do that while minimizing their suffering,” Wallace says. “It seemed like everything … I was doing could be rendered meaningless in 15 minutes if we didn’t manage to pull back from the nuclear abyss.”
Dr. Adam Goldstein, an associate professor of family medicine at UNC-CH, says Wallace is well known among Triangle doctors active in social causes.
“I think it’s rare to combine compassion with comprehensive knowledge of a topic, and then advocacy on that topic,” Goldstein says. “He certainly does that. For medical students in training, they need to understand you can do all three. As a physician, you’re going to have leadership opportunities. If you want to step up, you can do whatever it is you want to do.”
About 12 years ago, Wallace left his native Texas and settled in Chapel Hill, where his wife grew up. In the late 1990s, he was one of the doctors actively involved in the N.C. Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health, which spoke out against insurance companies’ growing control over medical decisions.
He testified about the health dangers of polluted air before a state House committee working on clean-air legislation. And he was appointed by Gov. Jim Hunt to the Smart Growth Commission, charged with finding ways to manage growth and its impact on people and the environment.
Last year, Wallace gave a lecture at UNC-CH on health-care reform in the United States. He believes that the nation should move toward a national health insurance plan similar to Canada’s. Forty-five million people in the United States have no health insurance, he says.
“Spending the amount of money that we now spend on health care, we could cover everyone in this country,” he says. “But the way our health-care situation is arranged now, there’s such an enormous amount of waste that we don’t do that.”
Still, Wallace doesn’t come off as preachy, his colleagues say.
“There are people that you meet and you say, ‘They are radical. They are obsessed,’ ” Tintinalli says. “He doesn’t try to strong-arm you, or convince you about his ideals. He basically lives them.”
To accommodate his social activism, Wallace works part-time at UNC-CH.
“I try to be modest in my use of financial resources,” he says. “I’d rather have the time than the money.”
He has also been studying Spanish intensively over the past four years, sitting in on undergraduate classes at UNC and traveling to Mexico for Spanish immersion courses. He speaks it well enough now to communicate with his patients in Panama, and with Hispanic immigrants who end up in the emergency room at UNC. And he’s finding other uses for his new skill: His newest project is to travel to Mexico to help train doctors there in emergency medicine.
Jan Sassaman, who organizes the annual trips to Panama for the Chapel Hill church, said he’s not surprised that Wallace volunteers year after year.
“Wes is a pretty down-to-earth guy,” the Chapel Hill resident says. “His priorities are not materialistic.”
Biographical Data:
WESLEY M. WALLACE
BORN: Sept. 26, 1947
EDUCATION: Texas Tech University, 1969; certificate in theological studies, Pacific School of Religion, 1970; Baylor College of Medicine, 1975; internship through the Central Texas Medical Foundation, 1976
JOB: Associate professor of emergency medicine, UNC-CH
FAMILY: Married to Raine Lee, trained as a lawyer. They live in Chapel Hill.
HOBBIES: Outdoor activities, including hiking, canoeing and birding
SPECIAL SKILLS: Expert in treating snake bites and other wilderness mishaps
MIGHT HAVE BECOME: An actor. Before enrolling in medical school, he lived in Canada for a year, where he acted in several radio dramas and had a small part in “Jerry Potts and the ’74s,” a film about the Northwest Mounted Police, now known as the Mounties.
