Dr. H Tim Pearce
By Justin Jarrett
In a way, Dr. H. Tim Pearce can thank the alphabet for bringing him to Beaufort almost four decades ago. Pearce was finishing his surgical training at the Naval Hospital Portsmouth in Virginia – the youngest of his group of 12 surgeons, the only one who was not married, and the only one who had not served some sort of operational billet.
“All of my peers told me I’d be going to a big gray boat and I was resigned to that,” Pearce recalls. But when his detailer called and asked where Pearce wanted to go, he shot for the moon. Pensacola, Jacksonville, or Charleston sounded nice. “He said, ‘You can’t go to those places,’ but he sent me a list of places I could go that included Cuba, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Guam, Okinawa and other such places. Alphabetically at the top of the list was Beaufort, South Carolina.”
For someone born and raised in the Carolinas who attended the University of South Carolina and MUSC, it was a no-brainer – and a stroke of luck, not only for Pearce but for the Lowcountry. Some 37 years later, Pearce is one of the area’s most respected surgeons and someone who is always giving back to the community.
Pearce comes from a long line of tobacco farmers from Person County, North Carolina, but he was born west of Charlotte in Shelby before the family moved to Columbia during his teenage years. He attended A.C. Flora High School and USC before medical school and his surgical training with the Navy. Even though Beaufort was his first stop, he quickly knew it would be his last. When he left the Navy in 1983, he set up a private practice and started putting down roots in the community.
“They called me the young surgeon in Beaufort back then,” Pearce said. “Now I’m the old surgeon.” At the time, Beaufort Memorial Hospital was a sleepy community hospital, but Pearce found himself working alongside peers who made a huge impact on the community through their personal connections with their patients. Determined to make his own mark, he sought out ways to give back beyond his day-to-day work in examining and operating rooms, serving on the local EMS commission and teaching the first advanced cardiac life support class in Beaufort County.
Pearce was named to the BMH board of trustees in 1986 and served as the board’s chairman from 1992-96, fulfilling his interest in ensuring the hospital flourished as an asset to the community. His time on the board was marked by legislative pressure to sell the not-for-profit hospital to a corporate interest, but Pearce led the resistance. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that the hospital to this day remains a county not-for-profit hospital that is basically owned by the people of Beaufort,” he said. Pearce’s influence on the medical community goes well beyond Beaufort. He also served on the S.C. Medical Association’s board, including stints as chairman and president, and is a delegate to the American Medical Association and a member of the governor’s medical marijuana task force.
Additionally, Pearce has been a mainstay on the Beaufort-Jasper Higher Education Commission, which has played an influential role in helping USCB emerge as one of the fastest-growing public universities in the nation over the past decade, and has served on the USC alumni association’s board. He plans to remain involved as an advocate for higher education in the state and in promoting meaningful healthcare reform “so that we as a country can recognize our responsibility to those less fortunate while engineering change that does not bankrupt the system and our country” for years to come. Pearce has had a handful of overtures and job offers that would have lured him away from Beaufort over the years, “but we didn’t take those too seriously,” he said. And the Lowcountry is thankful for that – and for Beaufort’s high perch in the alphabet.