Bruce Williams, M.D., Ph.D. : Tending to the Body and the Spirit

Dr. Williams

My husband and I sat close together on the sofa. To get the camera at the right angle, the laptop on the coffee table in front of us was perched precariously on his copy of “The Heart.”  And we waited for Dr. R. Bruce Williams (who lives in Chattanooga) to join us on Google Meet.  

This was the first interview conducted this way, the first that was not face-to-face in person. I didn’t know what to expect. When the doctor came online, it was difficult for me to see him clearly–I was unsure if I was accurately picking up significant facial expressions. I was disappointed. 

This reminded me of COVID-19, when our facial movements were hidden by masks. It reminded me that we had to rely on the appearance of the eyes to detect the emotions of the person in front of us. It reminded me that technology designed to connect people may deprive them of critical social signals. 

Anyway, after a few pleasantries, Dr. Williams quickly noted that three things shaped his career: 

The first was that six months before he graduated from medical school in 1973 in Melbourne, Australia, he developed a “pretty aggressive” case of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) complicated by acute serum sickness, a serious, life-threatening immune system reaction. 

Dr. Williams is fourth from the left in the top row (Credit: Royal Melbourne Hospital)

The second was that “around that time,” and with a “cultural background” in Christianity, he “became a Christian.”  

The third was that he “felt” the need to leave Australia for North America, to leave his homeland for a place unknown. (Reminding one of Abraham’s Lekh Lekha in Genesis 12:1.)

Leaving home and coping with, living with,  the active autoimmune disease, he started a three-year internal medical residency in Toronto, Canada.  During the second year of training, he was on high-dose aspirin therapy (4.8 grams per day) for the RA, and he felt “sedated.”  By the third year, as he struggled even more, he couldn’t deal with continuing.  Because he didn’t have the energy for a demanding specialty fellowship, he decided to try research. 

Dr. Ed Sellers

So Dr. Williams studied clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto for a year, mostly working in infectious diseases as the first research fellow of Edward M. Sellers, M.D., Ph.D., who had just returned from Mass General after his stint as Chief Resident. (By the way, Dr. Sellers, now a world-recognized authority in psychopharmacology and drugs of abuse, is the son of Dr. A. Sellers, who had trained in Canada with Dr. Charles Best, one of the co-discoverers of insulin in 1921.)

When Naprosyn (approved in 1976) was substituted for the high-dose aspirin, the sedation lifted, and Dr. Williams could return to clinical medicine. He started a fellowship in infectious diseases. Six months into that, there was an unexpected opening in an endocrinology residency. Since he had greatly enjoyed that relatively new specialty as an intern, he decided to apply for the spot–he was accepted. 

Following the rigorous two-year fellowship in Canada, Dr. Williams moved to the States for a position in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he practiced general internal medicine and endocrinology. Since he was only the second endocrine specialist in the scenic riverside city, he was very busy. For example, when sharing weekend coverage with two other internists, he might need to make rounds on as many as seventy patients. 

When he eventually transitioned to doing only endocrinology, only seeing patients with hormonal disorders, he made himself available to his referring doctors and was in demand at “ten or eleven hospitals.” He often traveled 500 miles a week, and as he made his way around the different facilities, he soon found that the unforgiving concrete floors “were not user-friendly” to someone with painful feet of RA. 

View of Chattanooga (Credit: National Geographic)

This was the early 1980s, as Dr. Williams (an outsider, an immigrant, an observer) was beginning to develop an interest in “what was happening to healthcare in the U.S.”  One notable part of this change, he said, was the federal government’s 1983 implementation of the so-called DRG (Diagnosis-Related Group) system. Under this plan, hospitals were paid prospectively as they were given a lump sum of money based on the patient’s reported diagnosis. This was an attempt to control soaring Medicare costs under the then-prevailing fee-for-service retrospective-payment model. It didn’t work as expected.

Rising Medicare Costs since 1975 and Future Estimates
(Credit: Medicare Trustees Report 2023)

Dr. Williams wistfully said that in the  “cottage industry” medical practices in Tennessee at the time, you could ask a colleague, a friend, to see a patient urgently, even somebody without insurance, and there was no hesitation at all. He said the “people were well-served” by this (informal) way of doing things that was under economic pressure to adapt to the new rules. 

But substantial changes in healthcare were happening long before then.  Even in the 1950s and 1960s, the close relationship between patients and their doctors was being slowly eroded as thousands of hospitals were built after the war (a result of the Hill-Burton Act of 1946, noted Dr. Williams ) and people (often without having a personal physician) began to routinely use the new emergency rooms for non-emergency ailments. 

Dr. Kissick

To delve more into this process, Dr. Williams took a few business courses at the University of Chattanooga. This sharpened his interest in the complex economics of healthcare and led to him earning an Executive M.B.A. at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. While in West Philadelphia, he studied under legendary Dr. Bill Kissick, one of the architects of Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare Act of 1965. Dr. Kissick later noted that the Act “had created a monster” after only a few years of it being in place, as all seniors now had health insurance, and the total cost of U.S. healthcare escalated rapidly. 

With his new social and economic understanding of the evolving pluralistic and individualistic American system of healthcare, Dr. Williams decided to forego the physical demands of clinical practice and to focus, instead, on the more sedentary administrative aspects of medicine. He did this for a good while: he was Chief of Staff at a VA Hospital, served as Medical Director at a hospital in the Boston suburbs, and later took a position with a hospital in Iowa. 

But he eventually realized he was not temperamentally suited for these bureaucratic roles. He decided to return to clinical practice, to return to taking care of one patient at a time. Where to go?

Gayle

His stepbrother was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his stepbrother's grandmother-in-law was finding it difficult to get an appointment with an endocrinologist. Dr. Williams showed an interest in helping out Dr. Charles Rost (no relation to psychologist Dr. Polly Rost in a previous story in this series). However, the proposed arrangement through Lancaster General Hospital wasn’t sufficient, and he moved across the river to York to work with Dr. Rita El-Hajj and Dr. Gayle Andrews-Murray, who were busy and in need of help. 

Dr. Williams started there as a locum tenens and was soon asked to join the practice. The work was “enjoyable” as he got to know Gayle and her husband Rich (both subjects of prior stories), their sons, and Rita. He stayed in York for ten years doing general adult endocrinology, sometimes helping out with paediatric patients.  

While the practice was heavily weighted to diabetes, thyroid diseases, and adrenal and pituitary disorders, he was surprised to find a good number of relatively uncommon conditions (including pheochromocytomas and patients with the syndromes of genetic multiple endocrine neoplasms)  in the small semi-rural community. But his deforming, painful rheumatoid arthritis made it difficult to manage a full-time schedule, and he eventually had to cut back. 

(He noted that in the practice he found that he could spend sufficient time with his patients, as the newly introduced electronic health record allowed him to finish his detailed clinical notes at home.)

Turning to the third thing that shaped his career, Dr. Williams told me that while he had felt a calling to be led by the Spirit in the mid-1970s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that he decided to read “all 66 books” of the Bible seriously. And in his careful reading, he chose to employ a scientific (i.e., medical) rather than theological methodology of analysis. 

How to be Led..

He was helped in this weighty task by his wife, Alta Ada Williams (whom he had met and married while living in Tennessee). She was an Oxford-trained classicist with a Ph.D., and knew Greek “and a bit of Hebrew.” Working together, they eventually finished a 520-page book titled How to be Led by the Spirit of God: Maturing in the Spirit” (published in 2008). 

Dr. Williams said that, in his studies, he was especially inspired by the work of the noted Chinese evangelist Watchman Nee (Nee Shu-tsu). In the early part of the last century, Nee taught that we are comprised of three components: the body, the soul, and the spirit. (After the 1949 Communist Revolution, Nee was imprisoned for 20 years for spreading his ideas; he died in a labor camp at 68 in 1972.)

In the book by Dr. Williams and his wife, human “anatomy,” as revealed in Scripture, was divided further into the physical body, mind, soul, spirit, conscience, and will.  

Following the mention of his wife, I wondered if Dr. Williams had children. He said that while he had none of his own, Alta Ada came with three teenagers (and that was more than enough!).  He told me that two of his father’s sisters had Huntington’s disease. While his father (who died in his 80s) was not obviously affected by this fatal hereditary neurodegenerative condition, there was still the possibility, in the back of his mind, that he, Dr. Williams, might have inherited the faulty gene and could pass it on. 

However, he said he really didn’t believe that would happen, and that the family history did not affect his having or not having a child. (Testing for the gene mutation wasn't available until 1993–but 90% of people at risk still refuse to be tested for a devastating untreatable disease.)

Anyway, Dr. Williams left the gratifying and congenial WellSpan group practice in 2009. After this, he took a variety of locum tenens positions that allowed him to continue writing with his wife. For instance, he saw patients at a small hospital on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula every other month for three years, worked for a while on the eastern side of Lake Michigan, and filled in for a Yale practice in Connecticut. 

Scenic Olympic National Park on the Peninsula (Credit: earthtrekkers)

When Alta Ada became ill, Dr. Williams stayed home with her for a year. She died in late 2018 at age 76. Following her passing, Dr. Williams left clinical medicine again and dedicated himself more fully to theological pursuits. Upon the urging of his pastor in Lititz, Pennsylvania (near Lancaster), he did some teaching. And in 2020, he “clearly heard the voice of the Lord” telling him to obtain a Ph.D. in research psychology. 

And in 2025, through a program with Dr. Jichan Kim at Liberty University, he was granted his second doctorate degree. He was surprised and pleased to find out that his dissertation on charting spiritual development and communication with God (as of September 18, 2026) has been downloaded more than 480 times, placing it in the top 90% of such academic works.  

According to the study’s abstract: “The human experience of Christian sanctification and communicating with the God of the Bible was studied using a Constructivist Grounded Theory. The setting was the United States, a post-truth society with concurrent falling church attendance, diminished Bible reading, and deteriorating social discourse.” 

He found that the 15 reborn participants he interviewed “were not fully obedient to Him, did not focus on His kingdom, maintained worldly cognitive patterns, and used less than full truth in their communications and behaviors.”  Tellingly, the subjects didn’t know what they didn’t know. (Dr. Williams is currently working on a book based on the 342-page dissertation.)

He is quite concerned about the spiritual effects of “the ground shifting” underneath the feet of people who don’t know why it’s happening. In his solitude, as he contemplates in silent prayer,  he sees the widespread loneliness, broken families, deep anger, and social problems that underlie many thorny issues in our exceedingly complex, uneven healthcare systems. 

He sees that the Church and U.S. Healthcare are both failing the people and are in sore need of repair. He sees that these failures are invariably tied to an array of impersonal systemic factors. He continues to search for ways to understand and to heal deep bodily and spiritual wounds. And, finally, he laments that “people are losing touch with themselves, with who they are.”   

So, after listening to kindly Dr. Bruce Williams for more than two hours, I can now see him more clearly.

Recommended Readings:

1. Kissick, William, L. M.D., Dr. P.H. Medicine's Dilemmas: Infinite Needs versus Finite Resources. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994. (Though somewhat dated, this is a carefully reasoned, detailed analysis of the problems we face and the many barriers to easy solutions. Concluding, Kissick mentions the University of Pennsylvania's motto: Leges sine moribus venae-"Laws without values are meaningless."  And he states that "the search for health security must reflect society's values and its emerging conviction that health care is a right for all Americans," p. 160.)

2.  Williams, Bruce, with Alta Ada Williams. The Church in Crisis. Lititz, PA. Lititz Institute Publishing Division, 2019. (Noted in the description of the book on Amazon: "The Church has lost its saltiness" due to "progressive and marked secularization of the Church over the past 400 years. "The Church no longer operates in the spiritual realm.")

By Anita Cherry 9/20/26