Intrepid public health hero, Dr. Rice Leach loved people

Dr. Rice Leach used to say, “I’m not fighting cancer. I call it arm wrestling cancer; you don’t get into a fight with something you know is going to win.”

On the morning of April 1, the wrestling match and an extraordinary life came to an end.

Leach’s adventures in public health spanned more than 50 years and stretched from South and Central America, where he met a ballerina named Mireille who became his wife, to his native Central Kentucky.

Born in Lexington 75 years ago and educated at Sayre Schoool, Leach was part of the University of Kentucky’s third medical school class. UK had also started the first Department of Community Medicine, led by Dr. Kurt Deuschle and fired by a sense of mission and service that also animated Dr. Leach’s career.

He worked in the U.S. Public Health Service and the Indian Health Service, ran government hospitals, served as the U.S. Surgeon General’s chief of staff, oversaw the cleanup of radioactive waste in an abandoned oil field in Eastern Kentucky and sat through who knows how many meetings.

I met Leach in 1992 when he was Kentucky’s public-health commissioner, a post he held for 12 years. He seemed to like everyone, even journalists, and always returned calls. I appreciated his willingness to explain the issues and epidemics that were in the news, especially when he threw in a story such as the one about treating a bubonic plague outbreak (it’s spread by fleas) in the desert southwest.

Another tale, recounted by Kevin Hall, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department’s communications officer, unfolded when Leach and Mirielle, and maybe one of their young children, were tooling across South America and heard explosions.

As Leach told it, he was worried about running out of gas, not before he could escape but before he could get close enough to discover the cause.

“That was Dr. Leach,” says Hall, “if there was an explosion, he wanted to be in the middle of it — to help anyone who needed it, to find out what caused the explosion and to learn how to keep it from happening again.”

He was intrepid in another explosive landscape, the one where science and politics intersect. I was reminded of this by a recent report about states where propagandistic misinformation riddles the state-ordered briefing that women receive before an abortion.

Kentucky is not one of them. I hesitate to publicize this because some politician will rush to change it. But our “informed consent” briefing is dispassionate, nonjudgmental and, above all, informative — much like Leach who oversaw its drafting after the legislature enacted the mandate in 1998.

He also was a great manager, which he proved after Mayor Jim Gray enlisted him in 2011 to lead the local health department out of a period of turmoil. He had just been diagnosed with lymphoma. As he underwent chemotherapy and radiation, he and his beloved public-health corps pulled each other through.

As admirable as all of that is, none of it accounts for why the people who worked for and with him loved him so very much. That would be his kindness and unfailing sense of fun.

Paula Anderson, chair of the board of health, says, “He cared about his staff as people first. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have high expectations, he did. But he cared about them, knew their health issues, their children’s names, when they were going through a rough patch. He ‘managed by walking around’ — handing out hugs and offering his unique brand of humor and wisdom. He did goofy things, handed out flowers to everyone on Valentine’s Day, loved to mug for the camera.”

Nowadays you hear that doctors are demoralized by the business demands of their profession. Perhaps Leach’s fascinating life and and profound legacy will serve as a beacon guiding them back to public health — it might be less lucrative but potentially more fun and rewarding.

Leach once told our reporter Mary Meehan that life “is all in the trip; and all the passengers, we are going to the same place,” also “there are an awful lot of neat people in on the journey with you.”

He also used to say, “Wash your hands, for crying out loud.”

Words to live by.

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 8:39 PM with the headline "Intrepid public health hero, Dr. Rice Leach loved people."