Stan Brock

Provider of free medical care in the US and remote Third World areas

Stan Brock, medical philanthropist. Born: 21 April, 1936 in Preston, Lancashire. Died: 29 August, 2018, in Rockford, Tennessee, aged 82.

Stan Brock, the founder of a medical charity providing health care in remote areas and co-host of a long-running US television show liked to tell of an exchange he had with the sixth man to walk on the moon.

He was recounting to that astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, what had prompted him to quit his job, sell all his belongings and found a volunteer mobile medical service for uninsured Americans and poor people in underdeveloped countries.

The organisation, the Remote Area Medical clinic service, or RAM, initially established volunteer medics in the Amazon and has since provided free care for hundreds of thousands of needy patients.

As the genesis story goes, he was a teenager at the time living with the Wapishana Indians in what was then British Guiana, and they had given him a wild Spanish bronco as a gift. The horse, which had killed a previous owner on a wild ride, was only slightly more forgiving when Brock climbed on board.

The bronco bucked across the savanna and collided with a barbed wire fence. Brock was thrown to the ground, the 700-pound stallion landing on top of him.

“I was very badly injured, but the nearest doctor was 26 days away on foot, through a narrow trail in the rain forest where you couldn’t take horses,” Brock said in a 2014 interview.

“Ed said: ‘Gosh, I was on the Moon and I was only three days from a doctor,’” Brock recalled. “Sure, I said, but for those people who lived in the Upper Amazon, and the 50 million people we’re now dealing with in the US, they might as well be on the Moon for the opportunity they have to get the health care they need.”

Stan Brock died on 29 August at RAM’S offices in Rockford, Tennessee, where he had lived ascetically since he founded the non-profit outfit in 1985. He was 82.

RAM began operating initially in British Guiana and then expanded to the United States in 1992, starting out with a single pick-up truck that hauled a single dentist’s chair.

It opened its first US clinic in Sneedville, Tennessee, in 1992 and still runs an airborne ambulance operation in what isnowtheindependentnation of Guyana.

The organisation estimates it has provided medical, vision and dental care to more than 700,000 patients since its founding, in areas ranging from Appalachia to New York City, and in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Last year, about 1,400 health professionals volunteered to treat2,300peoplewhoshowed up at one of RAM’S outdoor clinics at the fairgrounds in the western Virginia town of Wise. Some had camped out for three days to make sure they would be treated.

“The health fair reminded me of scenes I’ve witnessed in refugee camps in South Sudan,” journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times. “But here in America?”

RAM receives no government funding and is supported by contributions, which invariably escalated after potential givers learned in news reports about Brock’s unwavering commitment.

The organisation was the subject of a photo essay in The Times in 2007 and was featured on network television programs like 60 Minutes. Brock was profiled in a documentary film last year titled Medicine Man: The Stan Brock Story.

Stanley Edmunde Brock was born on 21 April, 1936, in Preston, Lancashire, to Stanley and Irene (Mandley) Brock. His father, a civil servant who supervised telephone installations, was posted around the country and later deployed to British Guiana, a colony until 1966.

When Stan was 17, he left the Canford School in Dorset to visit his parents over the summer and never returned to Britain, or to school.

“For five years I had been a prisoner of the establishment,” he wrote in a memoir, All the Cowboys Were Indians (originally published in 1969 as Jungle Cowboy), “strangled by a stiff white collar, black tie, grey drainpipe trousers and an ill-fitting jacket, herded like a convict, carrying armfuls of Chaucer, Homer and English history.”

He was married briefly, but said he had subordinated the relationship to his volunteer work.

“I’m trying to think of a way to put this – would I like to be married? Yes,” he said in 2014. “Would I like to have children? Yes. But I’ve got thousands of them now.”

He is survived by his brother, Peter; and a longtime friend, Karen Wilson, RAM’S former executive director.

Brock became a cowboy in British Guiana. There, from 1952 to 1968, he was the manager of the 4,000-square-mile Dadanwa Ranch, once the world’s largest cattle station, with 30,000 longhorn cattle and horses.

His other books, including Leemo: A True Story of a Man’s Friendship With a Mountain Lion (1967), brought him to the attention of a BBC filmmaker. He was then invited to join Wild Kingdom, the Emmy Award-winning NBC series, as a co-host with Marlin Perkins in the late 1960s. He appeared on the programme for more than a decade.

He also appeared in an American sitcom, The Corner Bar, and acted in several adventure films, including Escape From Angola in 1976 and Galyon in 1980.

He was credited with discovering a rare species of bat, which was named for him, Vampyressa brocki. He was also a pilot, which enabled him to reach remote areas, and he held a black belt in taekwondo.

Brock was instrumental in persuading Tennessee legislators to let licensed health care professionals from out of state volunteer to provide free medical services. RAM was non-partisan in debates about health care, though, he said.

“I’m just the voice of the homeless and the underserved,” he said. “But unless they fix these basic things, we’re going to be doing this long after my lifetime.”

Asked in an interview about his legacy, Brock said: “I hope that 100 years from now, nobody will remember me at all because this will be a thing of the past.”

“But,” he added, “there seems to be no end in sight.”

New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.

SAM ROBERTS

“For five years I had been a prisoner of the establishment, strangled by a stiff white collar, black tie, grey drainpipe trousers and an ill-fitting jacket, herded like a convict, carrying armfuls of Chaucer, Homer and English history””