A man whose name is synonymous with altruistic health care in the Fredericksburg area passes on

Date published: 8/31/2006

Dr. Lloyd F. Moss

DOC ADAMS didn't practice in Fredericksburg, nor did Marcus Welby. So when it came to naming a no-charge medical facility to treat the region's working poor, the Fredericksburg Area Health Council in 1993 chose a local personification of genial, down-home care and called it the Lloyd F. Moss Free Clinic.

There, thousands of our indigent neighbors--the child who has a fever that won't go away, the woman with a problem pregnancy, the man whose blood pressure makes him a high draft choice for the Memory Gardens League--have verified the adage that the best things in life are free, or can be when a wallet is thin and the stakes are high. It's a tribute to the life of Dr. Moss that most of those patients, who never actually laid eyes on him, keep his name somewhere in the recesses of benevolent memory.

Though maybe never seen driving a buckboard, Dr. Moss, who started his career six months before Pearl Harbor, rendered family care the old-fashioned way--with a black bag in hand by sickbeds in patients' homes. At his downtown office in the immediate postwar years--he had made major in the Army Air Corps--he stayed open for business until after 9 p.m. Fridays to accommodate predictable influxes of the sick and injured, at least until he figured out that the afflicted had taken in a movie before presenting themselves for the boons of the medical arts.

The Moss Free Clinic gave older doctors like himself a chance to continue that intimate style of medicine, increasingly threatened by government entitlement bureaucracies, HMOs, liability suits, and other harpies of modernity. Meanwhile, younger doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health-care experts could, as volunteers, enjoy a respite from medicine-as-business and revel in medicine-as-calling. Nearly 400 such professionals now pitch in at the clinic, which last year served some 1,400 patients--most decent, hardworking people not old enough for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid, and not lucky enough to carry employer-provided health insurance.

Dr. Moss, who died Monday at age 90, matched his considerable talents with those most in need of them. He now rests in the peace that awaits the good--while his legacy urges all of us never to rest as long as human beings suffer because of economic circumstance.

Date published: 8/31/2006