With his gifts of compassion and humility, Dr. Wallace Anderson dedicated his life to caring for people -- bodies and souls -- as a physician, medical missionary, and Bible study leader and mentor.
Anderson started his medical career as a general practice physician in the 1950s at a clinic in Lakeville, then spent many years at clinics on Lowry Avenue in Robbinsdale and at the former Golden Valley Medical Clinic. He worked as an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale from 1975 to 1986, and for one year served the as the hospital's chief of staff.
"He was quite proud of that," said his daughter Sarah Stover of Mountain Top, Pa. "His gift in medicine was the ability to diagnose what was going on [with a patient]."
Anderson died of natural causes last Friday at the Cornerstone Assisted Living Facility in Plymouth. He was 88.
He was born in 1921 in Minneapolis. After graduating from high school, he worked for one year as a painter with his father. Realizing that was not his calling, he enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. His education was interrupted while he served in the Army Air Force as a meteorologist, but he called that "divine providence," because when he returned to Wheaton he met his wife, Claire, his daughter said.
Anderson completed his education at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Then he took his medical expertise and Christian faith overseas. One of his first missionary trips was to a clinic in Taipei, Taiwan, that was named after his grandfather. There, he did tonsillectomies, appendectomies and "whatever he could to help," Stover said. He made subsequent trips to the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Kenya twice, she said.
He was on the mission board at St. Louis Park Evangelical Free Church and served on the church's elder's board. He was a mentor to many in the church and seen as a pillar of the congregation, said the Rev. Bob Amos.
