Brock, Stan

If you’ve already starred in adventure movies, co-hosted a wildly popular television series, worked as a bush pilot in the Amazon, run a cattle ranch in Guyana, published five books, earned a karate black belt, and discovered a new species that’s been named for you, what do you do for an encore?

If you’re Stan Brock, you stick your neck out to start a free medical relief service, Remote Area Medical. RAM flies doctors, nurses, dentists, technicians and vets into areas of the world where there’s absolutely no medical care.

Brock knows how it is to live so far from help. For 15 years he lived with the Wapishanas in the Amazon basin. He got malaria, dengue fever, and was attacked by wild animals—surviving it all without medical care. But he saw hundreds of people die from illnesses that could be easily cured with simple medicine.

Brock left the Amazon to become an animal wrangler on the 60s television show, Wild Kingdom. But he knew he’d have to do something, someday about medical care for people like the Wapishanas.

Since he founded it in 1985, RAM has made over a quarter million free “office visits” in settings that are always primitive and often dangerous.  Over 22,000 medical professionals have provided that care, even when they’ve had to parachute in to do it.

Everybody volunteers; they even pay their own expenses. That goes all the way to the top in this nonprofit—Stan Brock has never taken a penny out of RAM, and lives in one room of an abandoned schoolhouse the city of Nashville donated as headquarters for RAM. Judging from the width of the grin on his face when he talks about organizing the next RAM mission, his far-from-comfortable lifestyle isn’t hurting him a bit.

A 2009 report on Brock's work in the US. 

For an October 2009 interview with Stan Brock, click here.