The rest of his afternoon is spent grabbing a sandwich for lunch and putting in several hours training the residents. In her letter nominating Wright for the Physician of the Year, Sprute writes, “Dr. Wright exemplifies what all physicians in the practice of family medicine should strive for: clinical excellence, compassionate care, a dynamic and effective teaching style, which leaves a lifelong impression and a passion for improving the community in which we live.”

For Wright, it all began in the early ‘70s, after he earned a B.A. in molecular biology from the University of California at San Diego. He spent a year in graduate school at UCSD also studying molecular biology and then decided to join Volunteers in Service to America, a part of the War on Poverty similar to AmeriCorps. As a volunteer dedicated to helping the needy nationwide, Wright relocated to Austin, leaving behind the Southern California coastline.

TAFP's last four Physicians of the Year. 
From left, Douglas Curran, M.D., Leah Raye Mabry, M.D., 
David Wright, M.D., and Donald Niño, M.D.

After his time with VISTA, Wright entered medical school and eventually enrolled at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He graduated and three years later completed the family practice residency program at Central Texas Medical Foundation, known today as AMEP. Wright took a job with U.S. Public Health Services and moved to New Mexico to work at the Mescalero Indian Health Service Hospital.

In 1985, Glen Johnson, M.D., CTMF program director, called Wright and convinced him to return to Austin to assume the position of associate director at CTMF’s residency program. When Johnson resigned in 1987 as program director, he asked Wright to fill his vacated spot at Family Health Center and Wright did, for seven years.

“He has a great mastery of medical knowledge and is able to impart that knowledge to students and patients,” Johnson says. “He is the quintessential family physician.”

Moving to Texas with VISTA changed Wright’s life. There he met a lifelong mentor. He decided to become a physician and teach medicine as well. He met his wife and raised his children. He committed himself to fighting one of the most terrifying new illnesses of the 20th century and fought a serious illness of his own, cancer.

“I thought it would be a very positive experience to go someplace else and do something with another group of people,” Wright says about volunteering. “A lot of it was to sort of pay back, to give something back to society — a way to be thankful for what I’ve received.”

Wright began his service with VISTA in 1973 and spent the next three years coordinating volunteer efforts in south Austin. His first year in Texas, he encountered Mathis Blackstock, M.D., who was already providing medical services for indigent people.

“I remember the first time I met this man,” Wright says. “I went over to elicit his support in trying to get this clinic started. I met him in the basement of the Boys’ Club where he ran a little volunteer clinic with some other doctors.” Wright easily won over Blackstock, and the physicians moved their practice to the new, larger clinic at San José Catholic Church. Their combined efforts led to the founding of South Austin Clinic, which currently is run by the city of Austin.

“Fortunately we’ve been friends ever since,” Wright adds.

Blackstock remembers meeting Wright as well. “He was someone who people naturally gravitated toward and liked,” Blackstock says.

Blackstock, like Wright, is a graduate of UTMB. He has practiced medicine in Texas for almost 50 years and holds the philosophy that helping people who don’t have as much as you do is important. That is what led him to volunteer in south Austin and work for the city health department at a neighborhood clinic when he closed his private practice in 1974.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do until I met Dr. Blackstock, and then I figured out what I wanted to be: somebody like him,” Wright says. “I didn’t want to be a doctor; I wanted to be a doctor like this guy was a doctor. I saw what an impact he has on people’s lives and how you could, as a physician, bring about significant change and improvement.”

So I was sold on the idea of family practice from the beginning,” Wright says. “It’s what a true physician is. When you conceive of what medicine should be, it should be family practice.”

Blackstock had wanted to teach for a long time and in 1978, he became CTMF associate director. He has always felt tremendous satisfaction in both teaching and practicing medicine, and he remained on staff while Wright completed his residency. During that time they got to know each other better. Wright was one of several residents who were very smart, energetic and self-directed and who wanted to be the best doctors possible, Blackstock says.

Wright worked on the reservation in New Mexico for two years and returned to Austin and a reunion with Blackstock at Family Health Center. No longer teacher and student, Blackstock and Wright were professional colleagues, practicing medicine and teaching new residents together.

“His knowledge is so very broad, and it’s not superficial,” Blackstock says of Wright. “He does things that sort of border on spectacular sometimes.”

In 1991, Blackstock retired from CTMF, but just a few months into his retirement, Wright convinced him to return and teach part time. Today Blackstock still teaches and accompanies residents on home visits. He works with a children’s clinic, is a member of the Capital Area Master Naturalists, and is active in his church. He and his wife, Mary, also enjoy taking trips and spending time with their family.

“David is comfortable giving himself to other people. Most of us are not, to that extent,” Blackstock says. “He is a child of God. He just has very few bad qualities.”

In 1994, Family Health Center was renamed to Blackstock Family Practice Academic Associates, in honor of Wright’s mentor. “I learned what I needed to know to be a good doctor from him,” Wright says.

Wright continues practicing medicine at the clinic and serves as a faculty member of AMEP’s family practice residency program.

“This clinic could not exist were it not for the support of Seton [Healthcare Network] and the city of Austin, which both support the residency program,” Wright says. He calls the clinic a “safety net for the community.” Most of his patients are indigent and elderly, and he treats many people afflicted with HIV.

The clinic serves between 5,000 and 6,000 active patients. Some are on Medicaid and Medicare while others possess complete medical coverage. “Rule number one here is that everybody goes home with a sack,” Wright says. After he consults with each patient, he visits a closet stocked with medications “to go shopping” and returns with a plastic bag full of samples. The cost of treating HIV, for example, can total or exceed $12,000 each year, and Wright says he tries to do what he can to alleviate some of the financial burden.

Five or six faculty physicians, 21 residents and a couple of medical students work at the clinic and typically rotate at Brackenridge Hospital and St. David’s Medical Center. Each week Wright works 60-70 hours and is on call frequently. He visits homebound and hospice patients several times a month. The bulk of his time is spent at Blackstock and Brackenridge treating patients and attending to the residents, but he also makes trips to St. David’s, a children’s hospital and a local nursing home.

AIDS: Then and Now

Wright’s desire to help anyone explains why he welcomed people infected with HIV in the mid-‘80’s. “He takes care of those who other people don’t want to take care of,” says AMEP Family Practice Residency Program Director R. Russell Thomas Jr., D.O., who nominated Wright for the award on behalf of the entire residency program.

HIV, the virus that causes the life-threatening disease, AIDS, first surfaced in the United States in the early 1980s. People were left helpless and terrified by this virus that was infecting mostly homosexual men and intravenous drug users. Physicians could only treat the diseases they recognized in patients; they could do nothing about the virus that was slowly wearing down patients’ immune systems and ultimately killing most of them. “It was a time when the best you could do was be kind and compassionate,” Thomas says.

In the United States, about 800,000 people are currently living with AIDS. More than 29,000 Texans are estimated to have died from AIDS by June of 2000. By the end of 2001, reports show the cumulative number of AIDS cases in Texas at nearly 57,000.

“Back in about ‘83, people started to identify and know that there was something different going on out there,” Wright says. “You had people who were getting very sick and were having all these immune dysfunctions ... There wasn’t really anybody willing to take care of the patients. Nobody knew anything about taking care of people who had AIDS. They never had any training in medical school because it didn’t exist.

“A lot of times what we were trying to do was to keep people hopeful,” Wright adds. “For a long time I’ve had this idea that the role of the doctor is, to a large extent, to keep hope alive.”

Wright believes his first HIV-infected patient was a gay Native American man he treated while in New Mexico. At the time, he had no way to know for sure if the man had the virus because HIV tests weren’t available. All he knew was that his efforts to treat the man’s pneumonia were failing, and the man died not long after Wright began seeing him.

Once Wright returned to Austin as CTMF associate director, he began treating HIV patients regularly, but it was difficult. “All we could do was just sit by and watch people die,” he says. “We had no way to stop it, no way to treat it, no way to control it. It was sort of analogous to being a doctor in the pre-antibiotic era. It was a very humbling experience and made you have a tremendous appreciation for people who practiced medicine a long time ago.

“In 1985, when testing became available, it was very easy to figure out who was infected and who wasn’t,” Wright continues. “The problem from 1985 up until 1993 was that we didn’t have any treatments that were any good. What we were doing at that time was treating lots of opportunistic infections and complications that HIV patients can get.

“About 1993, once we had more drugs available, our focus shifted to trying to treat and control the replication of HIV. About 1997, it became much easier because of the fact that protease inhibitor drugs became available. Now we’re focusing not so much on treating and controlling HIV replications, but dealing with the complications and toxicities of the drugs.”

In addition to treating his own patients, Wright has been very active with local AIDS organizations including AIDS Services of Austin, Project Transitions and Hospice Austin’s Christopher House. The groups help provide physicians, housing, counseling, medication and other assistance to people with HIV and AIDS.

“I think that David has those qualities that are especially valuable for an HIV-treating physician because having HIV isn’t like having most other diseases: the degree of stress, the need for information, the experience of rejection as well as the sheer physical health impact ...” says Sandy Bartlett, ASA community information and education coordinator. “I think it takes a very special person to devote such effort to treating this particular disease.”

Marjorie Mulanax, executive director at Hospice Austin, also recognizes something special in Wright, saying that, “David just walks on water.” She adds that a few years ago, people at the Christopher House fondly called Wright “Saint David.”

Shaping the Future

Wright’s research into HIV began with a grant from the American Foundation for AIDS Research that was given to Family Health Clinic in 1990. The HIV Study Group formed in order to allow people in the community to have access to new HIV medications three to four years sooner than commercial providers could give it. Cynthia Brinson, M.D., a former student of Wright’s who has been instrumental in HIV research with him from the beginning, agrees with him that many people’s lives were extended or saved as a result of the trials. The research group eventually outgrew the clinic and moved to St. David’s, where it was renamed Central Texas Clinical Research, LLC. Wright has been a Principal Investigator for more than 10 years at CTCR, which conducts research on a wide variety of therapeutic areas in addition to HIV research.

Wright considers his most important research contribution to date to be helping conduct numerous clinical trials with protease inhibitors, drugs potent in inhibiting the replication of HIV. “Protease inhibitors had an incredible impact on people’s lives,” Wright says. He has been involved with more than 60 research studies since. CTCR currently is working on the HIV Vaccine Trial with the pharmaceutical company, Merck. Wright says that Austin has more people enrolled in the trial than any other city in the United States.

“Research allows you to be involved in things that are right on the cutting edge and allows you to be involved with things that will be standard of care three or four years from now,” Wright says. A background in molecular science has given him a better understanding of HIV, viral illnesses in general, and medications, he adds. He spends about eight or nine hours a week at CTCR.

“He’ll go above and beyond with his patients, and he never gives up,” Brinson says. “He will really try to keep them alive and get them better; he never throws in the towel.

“He is just an incredible physician,” she adds. “He is almost the ‘Doctor of Last Hope.’”

Back in his clinic office, the blinds are pulled all the way up on the large windows. Sunlight streams in, creating a pleasant environment. Paper and manila file folders are neatly stacked on a sprawling wooden desk, yet Wright claims that he is disorganized and prefers just to “go with the flow.”

The words “hope,” “smile,” “freedom” and “forever” are carved into four rocks on the desk. They are gifts from his wife. The meanings of those words seem to hang in the air throughout the clinic.

It is hard to tell whether Wright’s passion for practicing medicine or for teaching is stronger. “I’ve always really enjoyed being involved with residents. Young physicians always have so much enthusiasm, which is very infectious,” Wright says. “I feed off that. It keeps me energized and hopeful and stimulated all the time.”

Wright was director of Austin Medical Education Program when Leigh Fredholm, M.D., current medical director at Hospice Austin, had her admissions interview. “He’s certainly the reason that I came to Austin,” she says. “I think that’s true for most or all of my classmates as well. You read the brochure and everything looks good, but when we met David, it just kind of sealed the deal.”

While Wright liked being influential as the residency program director, he has enjoyed freedom from the meetings and administrative duties since stepping down. “I’m not a real big fan of rules and regulations,” he says.

Thomas, the residency program’s director, says, “He is the ultimate role model for all of my residents. They look up to him for the way medicine ought to be practiced.”

“It’s not easy to be a doctor; it’s difficult,” Wright says. “You have to give up a lot of your time. The people who really give up stuff are your own family.” Wright feels that he and many other doctors would agree their biggest regret is the time that practicing medicine takes away from their families. “They made a tremendous sacrifice allowing me to do what I do,” Wright says of his family. I feel like part of the TAFP award belongs to my wife, he adds.

Wright met Sheri Allison while working for VISTA. She was a graphic artist at the Texas Education Agency and was volunteering as a children’s art teacher. One day she went to Wright, who was organizing volunteer efforts at the Austin Neighborhood Center, for her instructions. She attributes their meeting to “fate.” Wright still smiles wryly when talking about her and says that it was “one of those ideal situations” when he bumped into his “soul mate.” They were married in 1976, and have two children, Kyle and Allison.

Wright’s family has stood by him through the difficult challenges his career has presented him with as well as through his personal struggles. Wright says that much of his reason for wanting to instill hope in patients comes from his own experiences.

A few months into his residency, when he was 30 years old, Wright received some distressful news. “I was diagnosed with having testicular cancer, which was a big blow and shock to me,” he says. “I had to have a couple of big operations, but what sort of sustained me was trying to maintain hope that things would work out. That had a tremendous impression and influence on me, and I think it helped me to be much more understanding and probably a better doctor.

“I think that anytime you reverse those roles and the physician becomes the patient, you really develop an insight of what it’s like to be on the other side of the stethoscope,” he adds. “It was very terrifying, but at the same time, it was probably one of the most positive experiences I’ve ever had.”

In addition to playing basketball at UCSD, Wright also played on the baseball team. Dave, as his wife calls him, is “a big sports nut,” and since moving to Austin, the two root for the University of Texas Longhorns when they can. They both share an interest in films and movies, abstract art, their religious faith and their children, she adds.

Sheri admits that her husband’s career takes a lot of time away from her and the family, but says they all understand and support him. “We wouldn’t want him not to be who he is,” she says. “We wouldn’t want him to do any less. He always wants the very best for his patients, and he’s always there when he’s needed.”