2005 Jefferson Awards: Thanks to Dr. Lewis Zirkle, thousands can walk

It came as a sobering awakening.

For years after he served as commander of a mobile Army hospital during the Vietnam War, Dr. Lewis Zirkle had volunteered to train orthopedic surgeons in Vietnam and Indonesia.

But in 1990, he stood in a hospital ward in Vietnam and asked how long a man had been lying in a bed with a broken leg.

"Three years," came the reply.

Zirkle, an orthopedic surgeon from Richland, realized that all the training he'd given meant little if the doctors didn't have the proper equipment. Without rods and screws to set the bone in place, the doctors were putting their patients into traction.

Broken bones often did not heal properly. Infections were common. A broken leg could mean amputation.

"I felt like everything I'd done was for naught," he recalled.

Zirkle, 64, is being honored with a Jefferson Award for taking action, and as a result allowing thousands around the world to walk.

He tried to get orthopedic medical supply manufacturers to donate equipment to hospitals in developing countries. But when they offered incomplete sets of older equipment, he started a non-profit company called Surgical Implant Generation Network, or SIGN, to manufacture the rods and screws out of a plant in Richland. The company, supported by private and corporate donations, sends them free to nearly 100 hospitals in 37 countries. Zirkle goes to the hospitals to train surgeons on using the equipment. Those surgeons train others. Thus far, the company has made 13,200 operations possible.

You'd never know the man riding his bike to his private orthopedic practice was responsible for thousands of people being able to walk.

"He's the most ordinary guy in the world," said his friend John Yagee. "You'd never guess he was a surgeon. ... He never wears a suit or a tie. He wears tennis shoes wherever he goes."

"The only way I can describe him is he's a guy," said Jeanne Dillner, SIGN's executive director. "I understand he's like an old country doctor in his practice, just very committed. Around here, even though he's the president of the corporation, he's very approachable. He's just one of the guys, and you have to understand, we're talking about machinists."

Last year, Yagee said, the Kiwanis Club gave Zirkle the Tri-Citian Award for his work.

"We had to use some deception to get him to the ceremony," he said. "We told him I was the one being honored because otherwise he wouldn't have gone."

But then Zirkle turned around and donated the $5,000 prize back to the Kiwanis Club for scholarships, said John McAllister, another friend.

Yagee said: "I think he takes his religious faith very seriously. He's not an evangelist. He doesn't teach religion out in the field. He believes we are our brother's keeper and puts it in actual practice."

Zirkle said he became a doctor almost by accident. "I always liked working with my hands," he said. He was born in western Massachusetts on a goat farm but grew up in North Carolina, where he felt out of place as a Yankee. He worked at a lumber mill and wanted to be a carpenter, but his mother insisted he go to college.

He attended Davidson College on a football scholarship, and started taking pre-med classes because most of his friends did. He got into Duke Medical School -- "I don't know how."

He was drafted into the Army in 1968 and, as a captain, served as the commanding officer in a mobile hospital.

What he saw set his life's work.

"Our goal (at SIGN) is to help people who've been injured through no fault of their own, whether it be civilians in war or pedestrians or bicyclists on the road. Highways are the new battlefields."

Yagee recalled a story Zirkle told him about being in Vietnam. "He'd go to this orphanage and take care of the children. One time the Viet Cong appeared and the nuns came and told him he had to flee. He got away, but when he went back the next day, everyone was gone."

Zirkle said, "I saw the horror and how the ordinary people got caught in the middle. They suffered horrible injuries, gunshot wounds. There was one young man who came in with a dislocated knee and bad burns. I treated him and it took a long time to get his knee straightened out. I remember he walked away without a limp. One day his father came. He'd taken the bus a long ways and he gave me this mango. The mango had indentations from his fingers because he'd traveled so long to give it to me."