Picking up where his previous book, Rescues from the Sky, left off, Contagion Chaser details Dr. Lee F. Walters’ transition from saving lives at sea as part of an air medical rescue team with the US Coast Guard to becoming an infectious disease “detective.” Starting with a one-year medical residency at the University of Wisconsin, he moved on to a two-year fellowship in infectious disease at the University of Vermont before beginning private practice in Arizona, which lasted over two decades. Although the infectious disease practice in which Walters engaged was a far cry from the highly dramatic and potentially life threatening rescues described in the first book, this memoir offers a different type of adrenaline rush as he seeks to discover the causes of various mystery diseases and find a treatment before it’s too late. With his patients’ lives often hanging in the balance, it’s an emotional journey that frequently leaves Walters feeling discouraged and depressed as his patients die due to lack of available treatments, especially when the HIV/AIDS pandemic hits in 1981. Supporting him throughout his investigations is the love of his life, Cara. Their relationship provides a heartfelt and romantic counterpoint to the heavy emotional burden of Lee’s work.
Contagion Chaser is available at Friesenpress.com and at Amazon.com
Review by Larry Keith, retired writer and editor for Sports Illustrated, Inc. and Time, Inc.
“Dr. Lee Walters should not be confused with that other great investigator Sherlock Holmes. Where the latter used a magnifying glass, Dr. Walters has a microscope. His ID is Infectious Diseases. In his world of medical discovery, the bad guys can be diseases you haven’t heard of and can barely pronounce: Munchausen Syndrome, Blastomycosis, Mastocytosis. Without proper detection and treatment, they can all be killers, and the reader walks closely beside Dr. Walters as he, and his duly credited associates, painstakingly seek a diagnosis and a cure.
In this absorbing book, Dr. Walters (a pseudonym, though he is very real) describes a medical journal’s worth of challenging cases. The reader shares the gratifying feeling of success when he saves a life and the devastation when the odds, especially in the early days of AIDS, are just too great to overcome. Even a doctor, we learn, can shed a tear of remorse.
This book continues the journey Dr. Walters began as a daredevil Coast Guard flight surgeon, recounted in Rescues from the Sky. It also includes his lively courtship and marriage to his wife, Cara, a nurse, who is brilliant in her own right, and his own battle with lymphomatoid papulosis (look it up!), which kept him out of work for 11 months.
Dr. Walters is the best kind of physician: caring, compassionate, fully informed and determined to give all in pursuit of a cure for his patient. Call him, and he comes. He is honest about his own weaknesses and those of his fellow physicians. Best of all, for his readers, he tells his remarkable story in a way that is both informative (for you medical mavens) and entertaining (for those who just want a good read.)
The book leaves you with two strong impressions: there are myriad terrifying diseases out there, most recently the Covid19 virus, but also innumerable doctors, nurses, and clinicians willing and able to take them on, no matter the hour or the day of the week. Thanks, Doc.”
Review by Rick Holton, a freelance writer who has a Ph.D. in English from Edinburgh University and has published several scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has also taught business writing in the graduate business schools at New York University and at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. In addition, he has provided business writing training to companies across a wide range of industries.
“Contagion Chaser is a worthy successor to the author’s previous book, Rescues from the Sky, which chronicles his two years in the U.S. Coast Guard, providing emergency medical services under challenging and often dangerous conditions.
In many ways just as exciting, Contagion Chaser describes his transition from being in emergency medicine to becoming a medical detective in infectious disease. It deals with Dr. Walters’s ongoing learning and daily challenges during a one-year medical residency at the University of Wisconsin, a two-year infectious disease fellowship at the University of Vermont, and private practice in Arizona.
The story of how he and his colleagues confronted new and changing diseases and managed to use their research skills to come up with unique, workable solutions is fascinating. In addition, there is an interwoven love story which demonstrates some of the personal challenges and rewards of his relentless efforts to cure disease.
Most poignant of all is the author’s experience with the developing stages of the AIDS epidemic, how at first there was little hope and how more and more tools gradually became available. Not only that, but the AIDS epidemic was also a crisis of perception, with many gays being shunned or vilified, as people made assumptions based on misunderstandings and prejudice. Dr. Walters learned the hard way that many parents of soon-to-be-sexually-active teenagers, didn’t want their children to know anything about it, thus preventing them from taking reasonable precautions.
Dr. Walters empathized with his patients and their families, and knowing that many people were reluctant to make it known that they had AIDS, or in many cases, even that they were gay, he started making house calls and meeting patients privately at his home office. The AIDS epidemic also has lessons for those of us who are currently dealing with the COVID crisis.
I recommend this book highly to anyone who is interested in infectious disease or modern medicine, or who simply wants to read about a person who has had an unusually interesting life.”