Doctor reached out to the marginalized
PHYSICIAN, SOCIAL WORKER, RESEARCHER DRAWN TO THOSE WHO WERE ‘STARVED OF HELP’
The first prostitute Joyce Wallace met was a young woman named Barbara, an electrical engineering student who worked nights in a brothel to pay her way through school. She was HIV- positive and died at age 23, weeks after receiving her degree.
Barbara was, for Wallace, a typical patient — marginalized and unseen, if not scorned. Often working out of a white Dodge van, Wallace cruised the streetwalker strolls of New York, distributing condoms, offering free medical care, administering HIV tests and collecting data as the AIDS epidemic emerged in the early 1980s.
Wallace, part physician, part social worker and part medical researcher who gained national recognition for her efforts to improve the health and lives of prostitutes, a population she had seen discarded as “throw- away women,” died at a hospital in New York City at 79.
The cause was a heart attack, said her son, Ari Kahn.
Wallace ran a private practice, was an attending physician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan and held academic appointments. But she devoted the great part of her energy — a force that was, by all accounts, gale- like — to the prostitutes.
“Many people just want these women to disappear — they’ve dehumanized them and turned their backs on their suffering,” Wallace told the writer Barbara Goldsmith, who profiled her for The New Yorker magazine in 1993.
“These women represent the failures of our society,” she continued. “They are the product of two decades of inadequate schools, dysfunctional families, domestic violence, incest, and, for that matter, the repressive ignorance of the Catholic Church. They are our responsibility.”
In 1976, she bought a private practice in Greenwich Village, where, at a time when homosexuality was deeply stigmatized, at least a third of her patients were gay men. Around 1980, she began seeing a striking number of cases among them of enlarged lymph nodes, an indicator of disorder in the immune system. One patient was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer that Wallace helped link to the virus that became known as HIV.
Confronted with cases such as Barbara’s, she began scrounging for grants to test for HIV among women and particularly prostitutes who used intravenous drugs. In 1989, Wallace conducted a study of some 950 New York prostitutes that revealed a third of them to have HIV. By 1993, The New Yorker reported, the leading cause of death for New York City women ages 20 to 39 was AIDS.
Kahn recalled that when he was a toddler, his mother sometimes took him with her when she drove through neighbourhoods where prostitutes congregated, his presence a tool for disarming untrusting women who might have doubted her intentions. To anyone who agreed to step into the van and receive an HIV test, she offered a small amount of money — perhaps $10 — or Mcdonald’s coupons. Anyone who came to her office to collect the results received a second instalment.
Wallace started a foundation for research on sexually transmitted diseases and conducted thousands of HIV tests over the years. She promoted needle exchanges and rehab services for those seeking to quit drugs.
Observing her sometimes chaotic operation, some critics regarded her as “an eccentric zealot,” Goldsmith wrote. Her efforts to establish halfway houses for prostitutes received intense opposition from New Yorkers, who did not wish to attract streetwalkers or drug users to their neighbourhoods.
But Wallace insisted that the women she served were those most in need of care.
“Their lives are worthless the way they are now,” she said on 20/20 in 1993.
“Their life expectancy is very short. They get beat up, they get killed. There’s nobody who cares for them, there’s nobody who loves them, there’s nobody who wants them.”
Joyce Irene Malakoff was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 25, 1940, and grew up in Queens.
She received financial help during her schooling from her paternal grandmother, who, according to The New Yorker, had fled the Jewish Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia at age 13 because her father had refused to allow her to pursue her education — a display of pluck that Wallace said inspired her own.
Wallace’s marriages to Lance Wallace and Arthur Kahn ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter, a son and four grandchildren.
After retiring from her private practice and foundation, Wallace took temporary assignments as a physician around the world.
“Her work and her life were very intertwined,” her son said, recalling that she pulled “all- nighters writing grant proposals with boxes of Chinese food scattered about.” On one occasion, Wallace encountered a prostitute who wanted to stop using drugs and could find nowhere to spend the night.
Wallace brought the woman home, gave her a dose of methadone, and, while making her hospital rounds, left her with Ari, then 10 or 12 years old. Neither had eaten dinner, and he recalled making a pizza. Wallace found a rehab facility for the woman, who later worked for her foundation.
“People were starved of help,” Kahn said, “and so grateful to get a little bit of it.”
THESE WOMEN REPRESENT THE FAILURES OF OUR SOCIETY. THEY ARE THE PRODUCT OF DECADES OF INADEQUATE SCHOOLS, DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, INCEST, AND FOR THAT MATTER, THE REPRESSIVE IGNORANCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. — JOYCE WALLACE
HER WORK AND HER LIFE WERE VERY INTERTWINED.