Dr. Fuller Sr. eulogized as medical legend

Leaves legacy of clinic, high standards

 

 

By MARY EVA CASSADA

Special to The News & Record

Dr. W. Allen Fuller Sr. was remembered over the weekend as a local healthcare icon, a dedicated surgeon whose expertise and 35-year career made him a household name. Fuller died Thursday morning at the age of 86 after about two years of chronic illness. He was buried Sunday in his wife’s family cemetery in the Lennig community of Halifax County. Fuller put down his scalpel in 1989, said one of his five children, Dr. West Fuller of Richmond, after a career of leaving home at 5 a.m. and returning at 1 a.m., practically 51 weeks a year. West Fuller recalled that when he played high school football in the 1970s, an era before pagers and cell phones, the state police would fetch his father from the stadium so he could go to the hospital and operate. He was one of the first two specialists in Halifax County and the first board-certified surgeon. Along with Dr. Lucien Roberts, he established Fuller-Roberts Clinic adjacent to the Halifax Regional Medical Center.   From its original three physicians (also on board was an internist),

the clinic has grown to a staff of about a dozen, including surgeons,

OB-GYNs, pediatricians and nurse practitioners. The synergy between the hospital and the Fuller-Roberts Clinic afforded

Halifax County the medical advances that the rest of the country was enjoying, something not all small towns in Virginia had.

“He certainly helped lay a foundation, … but he wasn’t the only one,” said oldest son, Dr. Allen Fuller Jr. of South Boston. But with Roberts, the first local obstetrician-gynecologist, “They sort of added a new dimension” of expertise. It wasn’t always smooth, or profitable, sailing. West Fuller said his father and Roberts were asked early on to put up $10,000 a piece for the hospital’s operating room. No, they wouldn’t own a share of the hospital, they’d just have a decent place to practice.

“This was in [about] … 1954, and that was an enormous amount of money,” West Fuller recalled. His father had to borrow it. By 1960, the Fuller-Roberts partnership had grown and the men bought two acres of land behind the hospital. “The land was swampy and overgrown but inexpensive. … We had been given a verbal commitment by a mortgage company in Richmond for funds to construct the new office but when we contacted them we were told we

were ‘thinking too big for a small community’ and denied our loan,” wrote Roberts in remarks delivered last year at the dedication of a hospital conference room in the pair’s honor. With the help of Francis Hunt, an uncle of Roberts’ wife, the two got a loan from Durham Life. Thus began Fuller-Roberts Clinic, which was enlarged in 1976 by a

doubling of its pediatric section and the addition of a medical-surgical wing. It had ultrasound before the hospital and the first office mammography, recalled Roberts, who retired in 1991. To have such an impact, “He worked his *** off,” quipped West Fuller, who started out in journalism and is now a radiologist. “He was a terrible role model for a work ethic for me. He worked all the time.” “It wasn’t so much that he was a workaholic as it was just commitment

and dedication,” said Armistead Fuller of Halifax, his third child. “We worked 24/7,” confirmed Roberts.

Fuller was a son of “Old Dr. Fuller,” or Dr. Rawley H. Fuller, who established the Little Retreat Clinic in Clover, (the name presumably a play on Richmond’s Retreat Hospital) back in the 1920s, and later went on to organize the former South Boston Hospital located where Boston Commons assisted living facility is now. After attending school here, Fuller graduated from St. Christopher’s School in Richmond (playing on an undefeated football team) before

studying at Washington & Lee University and going on to the Medical College of Virginia. His internship was at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. After two years in the U.S. Army, he returned to MCV for surgical training. Despite having “no notion of coming back here,” Armistead Fuller said, Fuller and Roberts started their practice in 1954 in the small brick building next to the Jiffy store on Wilborn Avenue.

“We got a lot of kidding about our office location as Powell Funeral Home was on the corner next to us and the tombstone store was across the street,” wrote Roberts. West and Armistead Fuller aren’t sure why their father returned to practice in South Boston, but their mother, Lucy Byrd Hodges Fuller, hails from here. Armistead Fuller believes that the late Jimmy Edmunds, long on the hospital board, played a pivotal role in wooing him: “He

went and sought out my dad, twisted his arm and brought him back here” to the one-year-old, 50-bed hospital.

“There would’ve been more money in the cities, more glamorous work,” Armistead Fuller conceded, but his father had no regrets. Even as the well-educated son of a surgeon who was given the nickname The Little Prince, Fuller had great compassion for his patients, Armistead Fuller said. “If he’d been elitist he wouldn’t have come back here,” he said. Allen Fuller Jr., the eldest child and a third-generation doctor, said his father’s career coincided with a boom in the profession. “He came along at a time when surgery was really blossoming as a specialty,” Allen Fuller Jr. said. With postwar medical advances and antibiotics, “You could do a lot more for people.” Still, medicine has changed in a half century: Armistead recalled that, years ago, local doctors would check impoverished old tenant farmers

into the hospital for the winter, knowing it would save their lives because their shacks couldn’t withstand the weather.

“He respected everyone,” Armistead Fuller said. Nor does West Fuller recall his father talking about his work once he was at home (“He was like a soldier going to war.”) but the younger Fuller was keenly aware, even as a child, of his father’s stature in the community. “I grew up understanding that he was a hero. … I was glad for people to

recognize my dad; I knew he was providing something that was really essential,” said West Fuller, who took pride in people saying, “Oh, yeah, you’re Dr. Fuller’s son.” Wrote Dr. Harold T. Crowder, who joined Fuller-Roberts Clinic in 1960: “Though a little reserved and always proper, he showed great concern and empathy for his patients and fellow physicians. He was a very knowledgeable M.D., a skillful surgeon and always thorough and compassionate. I depended on his mature judgment and expertise in consulting with him on possible pediatric surgical problems.”

Fuller’s formidable reputation often preceded him. “Some nurses apparently held him in awe with possibly slight fear. I remember being on the pediatric ward once and telling an older nurse that Dr. Fuller was right behind me; she immediately went to the restroom and did not come out until he left,” remembered Crowder, a retired pediatrician who lives in South Boston. Surprisingly, West Fuller said, medicine wasn’t his father’s first career choice.

“He said his dream work would be a Formula race car driver or a ballet dancer,” West Fuller said. “He was way cultured.” As a younger man, he painted. He loved classical music and upon his retirement his kids chipped in to buy him a cello and lessons. For years, Sunday mornings would see Fuller driving from his Halifax home to the bus station in South Boston to buy a copy of the New York Times. Fuller’s refinement stayed with him until the very end. On his last admission to the hospital, just weeks ago, a nurse posed the standard question, “Dr. Fuller, do you know where you’re at?” “Even though so many lights had gone out in his head,” West Fuller said with a laugh, he caught the grammatical error: “Where I’m AT?” And, of course, he golfed. The Fuller sons couldn’t single out an achievement of their father’s that stood above others. “He was a real gentleman,” said Armistead Fuller.

“I know we’re proud of him,” said West Fuller. “He was the most noble and dignified man I’ve ever met.”

Said Allen Fuller Jr.: “He was a very good surgeon and he took good care of his patients – and he liked his patients.” “…[W]e are pleased to have played a role in the development of excellent medical care in our area,” wrote Roberts. A complete obituary is on Page 3A.