WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Ronald B. Mack, M.D., professor of pediatrics, emeritus, at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and a national expert on poisoning, died Wednesday. He was 77.
Mack, who joined the faculty in 1975, wrote regular columns on poisoning both for Contemporary Pediatrics, a monthly national medical journal for pediatricians, and for the North Carolina Medical Journal. For those columns, he received the 1987 Jesse H. Neal Editorial Achievement Award – a gold medal – from the Association of Business Publishers.
He also was editor of Poison Line, the bulletin of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, and associate editor of the accident prevention newsletter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Mack served for six years on the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on accident and poisoning prevention. He continued editing Poison Line even after he retired.
He was highly acclaimed as a teacher at what was then called Bowman Gray School of Medicine, winning the medical students’ award for clinical teaching excellence in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1995, and a record nine times from the physician assistant students. The medical students also dedicated the yearbook to him in 1986.
Most of his student contacts came as a faculty preceptor in pediatrics at Reynolds Health Center, the predecessor to Downtown Health Plaza.
Mack graduated from Loyola University of Chicago in 1950 with a bachelor of science. degree and in 1954 from the Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University with his medical degree. He did an internship at Cook County Hospital in 1954-55 and a residency in pediatrics at Mercy Hospital in Chicago from 1955-57.
He was in private practice in Berwyn, Ill., from 1957-1972, when he became academic director and chairman of the division of pediatrics at MacNeal Memorial Hospital and clinical associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He left those posts in 1975 to come to Bowman Gray.
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Media Contacts: Robert Conn, rconn@wfubmc.edu, Shannon Koontz, shkoontz@wfubmc.edu, or Karen Richardson, krchrdsn@wfubmc.edu, at 336-716-4587.
About Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center: Wake Forest Baptist is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health Sciences, which operates the university’s School of Medicine. The system comprises 1,298 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” by U.S. News & World Report.