Gerald A. Wilson thinks of his involvement in South Carolina’s medical community as a way of paying back the education the Columbia surgeon received in the state’s public institutions of higher education.

“All of my training has been state-supported,” said Wilson, who earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Carolina in 1971 before attending the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where he received his medical degree.

“I couldn’t afford a private-school education, and as a result, I’ve felt an obligation and commitment to giving something back for my training. There are several ways I’ve been able to do that,” he said.

Wilson is chairman of the board of the S.C. Medical Association, was president of the Columbia Medical Society, and is involved in no fewer than 11 other medical organizations and groups, while also serving as a clinical instructor for USC’s School of Medicine and MUSC.

He chairs the State Health Planning Committee, was a member of the dean’s search committee for the USC School of Medicine in the early ’90s, and in the late 1990s served on then Gov. David Beasley’s Health Advisory Committee.

“Organized medicine is one way of responding to the needs of medicine and being able to provide care, so I’ve been involved in medical organizations to a great extent on two levels: those for black physicians, and others for all doctors,” Wilson said. “I don’t see that as being contradictory, but rather complementary. And it’s helped me set the agenda to make others aware of the health disparities that exist between the races in South Carolina.”

Wilson is the third of four children whose mother, Veronica, taught middle- and high-school English in Hartsville, and whose father, Cornell Wilson Sr., was a brick mason. The younger Wilson was inspired as a youth to become a doctor by the example of a black Hartsville family practitioner named Walter McMath, whose “soothing, calming manner always went a long way towards making sick people feel better.”

All of the Wilson children went to college after they graduated with honors from Hartsville’s all-black Butler High School. Three of them, Gerald and brothers Cornell and Dennis, attended USC. Gerald was the first African-American student to enroll in and complete the University’s honors program. Dennis, also a doctor, is a partner with Gerald and Everett L. Dargan in Columbia’s Midlands Surgical Associates.

While at the University, the honors program and participation in the USC Concert Choir were two of Gerald Wilson’s most formative influences. Some of the smaller honors program classes were extremely interesting and made it easier for him to acclimate to the campus while establishing friendships that he still maintains today.

Performing in the USC Concert Choir as a second bass helped make him more well rounded, he believes, and appreciative of different ethnic groups and cultures. He still laughs at the memory of being at a major Southern university whose concert choir, directed by Arpad Darazs, a Hungarian, “could sing Negro spirituals so beautifully.

“One of the problems we see now in this country has to do with physicians not recognizing the fact that there are differences in the treatment of people because of their ethnic roots and backgrounds,” he said. “Doctors have to be culturally aware and sensitive to that. If you’ve never experienced those differences, it’s difficult to provide the kind of special care that people might need.”