By LES HIGH
Editor

At age 16, John Munroe decided he wanted to be a doctor.

He was driving through downtown Elizabethtown when he had an epiphany.

“It was like the world lit up. I decided right then and there I wanted to be a doctor,” Munroe said. “It just happened.”

The Columbus County Regional Healthcare System Foundation honored Munroe at its annual fundraiser dinner earlier this fall. It was an honor long overdue, in part because Munroe has always shied away from publicity.

But his disdain of the limelight belies the fact that he is one of the county’s most colorful physicians and personalities. When he opened his practice here in 1967, he was on the cutting edge of internal medicine, endocrinology and cardiology. In addition, his fishing and hunting exploits, among others, are legendary. For example, he has two titanium hips, in part from all the pounding he’s taken on his saltwater boat, the John Henry. He is extraordinarily well read and has an inquisitive and quick mind. He rides his bike three miles a day and treats his bird dogs like family. In the big city, maybe they’d call him a renaissance man, but his friends simply call him “Doc.”

Dr. Sam Wheatley, whom Munroe recruited to Columbus County nearly 30 years ago as an OB-GYN specialist, said that Munroe was responsible for much of the positive change in the local medical community over the years.

“He brought specialization to the county when he came here in 1967,” Wheatley said. “He was so busy in his early years, he worked all the time. Because he specialized in internal medicine, he brought a lot of patients here who had been going to other places. He ushered in a new dawn of specialized care.

“He’d never tell you this, but he was the catalyst for much of what we have today. He pushed hard for a CCU (cardiac care unit) at the old hospital and to get the new hospital built. Once you get a nice facility like the one we have, it’s easier to attract physicians and specialists. When I came here in 1978, I was the 13th member of the medical staff. Now there are 50. He had a lot to do with me coming here as well as a lot of other specialists.”

Wheatley added that “when you become friends with John Munroe, you have a friend for life. He embraced me and my family when we came here and he and Sylvia invited us to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner every year.

“He went out of his way to make us feel welcome. He’s done that for a lot of other people.”
•••
Munroe, 73, grew up in Bladen Springs in eastern Bladen County near the Cape Fear River, the son of Homer and Katrina Munroe. His great-grandfather was a Presbyterian missionary who founded Mt. Horeb Presbyterian Church in the 1840s (the church is still an active congregation today).

“My mother and father were very, very nice people. I was lucky,” he said.

His father was a tobacco farmer.

“I was a tobacco farmer, too, until I went to Chapel Hill,” Munroe said. “People asked me why I went to medical school. I told them it was to get out of those green tobacco fields.”

Munroe distinguished himself early in life. He was in the first class of Morehead Scholars at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“I’d never been on campus,” Munroe said. “They put us up in the Carolina Inn and we interviewed for three days. They’d slip a piece of paper under your door after each round and I made the final cut. We didn’t really have a concept of what it was all about because there was nothing to compare it to.”

He thumbed back to Bladen Springs from Chapel Hill and arrived home late in the night.

“I woke up my daddy and told him I’d won the Morehead Scholarship,” Munroe recalls. “All he said was, ‘Good,’ and he rolled back over and went to sleep and that was that. I was one of eight who made it. I guess we sowed the seeds for what it is now.”

Munroe was also Bladen County’s first Eagle Scout, something he considers an even greater honor than the Morehead Scholarship.

Munroe graduated from Elizabethtown High School in 1953. He finished his undergraduate studies in three years at UNC and then attended four years of medical school there. He got his MD in 1960. Munroe met Sylvia, to whom he has been married for 50 years, on a blind date in 1955 and they married in 1957 while he was in medical school.

They have four children, John Jr., Alex, Walter and Grace Ann.

Munroe interned at the University of Florida Teaching Hospital in Gainesville and became chief resident and instructor in medicine. He did a two-year research fellowship in endocrinology, then served in the U.S. Air Force, rising to the rank of captain at Beale Air Force Base in Sacramento. He was not only the chief of internal medicine, he was also the main pheasant hunting guide for the visiting brass. He received the Air Force Commendation Medal, unusual for those not in combat.

He went back to Florida after the Air Force and became certified in internal medicine.

“I liked diagnostic medicine,” Munroe said of internal medicine. “It was challenging but rewarding.”

Munroe took a real interest in diabetes under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Shipp, a leader in diabetes research. “He had a brilliant mind and he inspired me,” Munroe said.

One of the jobs that helped pay Munroe’s way through school was to feed and water 200 diabetic rats used for research, seven days a week. Munroe eventually supervised 22 lab assistants in the diabetes program and ran diabetic camps for children in Florida.

“Diabetes at one time was a fatal disease,” Munroe said. “Life expectancy in 1922 was six months. It’s always been a fascinating disease to me. We did a lot of research on metabolism and the breakdown of fats and its relationship to diabetes.”

Munroe enjoyed research and considered making a career of it, but the politics of academics drove him back to his roots.

He and Sylvia looked at Wilmington, but the day they visited, it was hot and they were caught by the bridge over the Cape Fear River, so they looked at Whiteville.

In July 1967, Munroe opened his practice in Baldwin Woods in a small, brick building formerly owned by Dr. W.E. Baldwin Jr. Office hours were 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays and until 1 p.m. on Saturdays. An office visit was $6.

His first nurse was Shirley Meggs, and he had a receptionist.

Being a physician in those days meant long hours and long days.

“I was on call for eight years, seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” Munroe said. “There were no breaks because it was just me.”

The first doctor to join him was Bobby Burns, followed by John Kelly and John Pease. Munroe formed Southeast Internal Medicine in 1970 in the building where the practice still carries on today.

Munroe brought a special set of skills with him when he came to Whiteville. He was one of the few physicians in the region who specialized in internal medicine and endocrinology. He had also done extra training in cardiology.

It was Munroe who pushed hard for a coronary care unit at the old Columbus County Hospital, now the Miller Building. The concept of a CCU, which provided 24-hour monitoring of heart rhythms, was new in North Carolina. Duke and Chapel Hill had CCUs, but they were rare at rural hospitals.

“I was tired of seeing people die from heart attacks,” he said. “You’d make rounds and by the time you’d come back, they’d be dead. There was no way to monitor them.”

Soon, Columbus County Hospital was seeing patients from across the region. The “new” four-bed CCU had monitors and a defibrillator and a dedicated team of nurses – Jesse Rose McQueen, Betty Theodorakis, Pat Norris and Carolyn Baldwin, among others.

“We had a whole string of damn good nurses,” Munroe said. “They were good because they had to be good. We worked our butts off.”
The CCU saved lives. “It was a good feeling to see somebody who was essentially dead walk out of the hospital one day,” Munroe said.

He recalls one elderly lady, however, who gave him “the business” for bringing her back from the dead.

“She said it was very peaceful and she didn’t want to come back,” he said. “Many have told me they’ve sat up above us and watched us work on them. I’ve never had one come back and tell me it was bad. If it was one who’d said it, it would be one thing, but it’s been many.”

Munroe still sees patients in his office and even makes the occasional house call. The other doctors at Southeast Internal Medicine admit and treat his patients in the hospital.

He says he enjoys practicing medicine. “I love my patients and I love my work,” he said. “I don’t see myself quitting anytime soon.

“Medicine will always be a fascinating field,” he added. “If you put your heart and soul into it, you’ll be a good doctor. You get out of it what you put into it.”

Munroe admits that he’s always hated death.

“I get very attached to my patients. I could never tolerate death. I felt like I’d let them down. I never could go to funerals. I always break down.

“It gets to a point where you don’t have patients who die, you have friends who die. It can be hard emotionally, but you’ve got to find a way to separate yourself from it to the degree that you can or you couldn’t handle it.”

•••
On a personal note, Munroe has been my family’s doctor since I can remember. He has a unique style of doctoring and compassion that perhaps will never be seen in these parts again. Though his assessments can be quite frank, he endears himself to his patients.

My grandmother, who died two years ago at age 97 after a lifetime of relatively good health, would occasionally get stressed out over the latest malady.

More often than not, all she needed was Dr. Munroe to lay his hand on her shoulder and tell her she was going to be all right. Even after she moved to a retirement village in Laurinburg, she never trusted her doctor there quite like she trusted John Munroe.

Some doctors have this gift, others don’t. Hundreds of Munroe’s patients have been blessed to have a doctor who does.

I asked Munroe in our first interview to define where science ends and true healing begins. And even more specifically, I wondered about something he’d said, about how he’d decided, out of the blue while cruising through downtown Elizabethtown at age 16, that he wanted to be a doctor.

“Do you think maybe it was Divine intervention?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said.

We both reflected on the exchange for a few moments.

He never did say. He didn’t have to.