November 15, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Photograph courtesy of Remote Area Medical
For more than a dozen years, Stanley Brock worked on a sprawling cattle ranch in Guyana’s remote Amazon basin. While in the rugged rainforest, he survived malaria and wild-animal attacks. But Mr. Brock watched many others die from treatable disease and injury for lack of medical care.
The former cowboy and one-time co-host of the Wild Kingdom wildlife television program founded the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps in 1985. “The original purpose was to take airborne medical teams down to Guyana and into isolated areas to fix people’s teeth, fix their eyes, and do general medical work,” Mr. Brock says.
The Knoxville, Tenn., charity now runs a regular “air ambulance” service in the South American country, delivering all-volunteer teams of doctors, dentists, and health-care workers into the region, and shuttling patients out. Mr. Brock, the charity’s chairman, often pilots the winged ambulance.
Mr. Brock later learned that a lack of access to health care, or an inability to afford it, was more widespread. “We saw there was a need right here in the United States,” he says.
More than half of the corps’s missions are now domestic, and teams providing free health care visit Indian reservations, Appalachian hamlets, and other remote areas. They treated thousands of people in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
Private donations account for the bulk of the group’s $200,000 annual budget.
In rare but dramatic cases, the organization’s teams arrive via parachute. Here, a group of health-care professionals who volunteer for the charity prepare to bail out during a mission to Lamb’s Mountain, Tenn. Mr. Brock was piloting the charity’s historic, World War II-era cargo plane.
