While training at a Virginia hospital in the 1960s, Dunlap watched doctors battle to revive a heart attack patient. They were so desperate, one sliced open her chest. Another squeezed her heart to make it pump. She lived but was badly brain damaged.

"I can see that like it was yesterday," Dunlap says somberly, still chilled by the outcome.

After practicing medicine for 32 years in Raleigh, Dunlap is widely praised for caring about the quality of his patients' lives -- and their deaths. He traces his concern to the legacy his country-doctor grandfather left behind. People on and off Dunlap's patient roster benefit from it.

Twenty six years ago, Dunlap helped found Hospice of Wake County, the nonprofit organization that cares for more than 1,400 dying people and their families every year. Dunlap remains active on its board, supporting efforts to expand services and raising money to help pay for them.

If Hospice of Wake gets state approval and raises enough money to build a new headquarters, a patient-care center will be at its core. The center will resemble a house more than a hospital or nursing home and will welcome dying people unable to remain at home. It will be called the William M. Dunlap Center of Caring.

Dunlap's patients say that is fitting. The doctor has built his career tending patients with an old-school approach. He never got the memo announcing house calls are obsolete. He sticks with his patients, even as they try to cope with illnesses other specialists treat. And when death can't be beat, he steers them to medicine focused more on comfort than conquest.

Charles Latimer, a retired IBM manager, learned that when his wife of 50 years, Louise, was dying of soft tissue sarcoma in 2003. As she grew weaker, Dunlap invited Latimer to meet at Rex Hospital for a talk. For an hour and a half, the doctor explained how the disease progressed. He offered to contact Hospice of Wake to arrange end-of-life care for Latimer and his wife. He volunteered to explain it all to Louise Latimer himself.

"He's so compassionate. He has so much feeling for his profession and his people. He's just that kind of guy," Latimer says.

Dunlap resists efforts to depict him as a saint. He readily owns up to a hot temper. Exhibit A is an ice chest at the old Rex Hospital that was dented for years after the shaggy-haired physician kicked it in a moment of frustration.

But the slow-speaking doctor has obvious gifts when it comes to connecting with patients. He fully focuses on one person at a time, locking eyes while talking. If he has obligations scribbled on the paper calendar folded in his pants pocket, they must wait.

Drawing on his roots

Dunlap traces his approach to doctoring to his grandfather, John Wickliffe, who practiced for 55 years in Oconee County, S.C., before his death in the early 1950s. Sometimes a chicken or canned green beans were his only pay. But it was apparent to Dunlap that his grandfather and the people of Oconee County gave each other a lot.

"The personal relationships he had with the families he treated really appealed to me," Dunlap says.

The son of an N.C. State University textiles professor father and a schoolteacher mother, Dunlap grew up in Raleigh only minutes from where Rex Hospital now stands. At Broughton High School, he was senior class president in 1957. At Duke University Medical School, where he landed after four years at UNC-Chapel Hill, he was elected senior class president again.

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