WAVELAND, Miss. -- This is a place where there is no wait to see the doctor, where insured or not, the services are free.

Where a piece of cardboard shouting "medical clinic" is propped against the entrance to the facility -- an arched tent.

There have been five heart attacks here since summer. In the beginning, patients were carried in on makeshift stretchers of household doors.

Since Hurricane Katrina hit in August, this medical tent has been here -- on the edge of a parking lot in Waveland, Miss., nine miles from Kiln -- open seven days a week for 12 hours or more.

It is staffed by volunteer doctors, pharmacists and lab technicians from across the country. They see patients with coughs and colds, treat insect bites, prescribe diabetes and blood pressure medicine.

This week, the medical tent staff has included Dr. Bob Roth, a retired Lewis-Gale plastic surgeon, and Dr. Lee Anne Steffe, a Roanoke pediatrician.

Steffe wore her stethoscope when she came to Kiln earlier this week with Roanoke's Interfaith Coalition of Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a group of Roanoke-area churches and synagogues that has adopted and is helping to rebuild the 2,000-resident community.

Steffe could have easily left the instrument at home. As she treated babies with colds, she found the clinic had everything she would need.

"The facilities are pretty incredible," she said. "It's set up like a M.A.S.H. tent."

The medical tent is run by Brad Stone, a 25-year-old man with a beard, glasses and a woven poncho. He is an EMT who came here from Chicago.

A biology major studying pre-med at Harvard University Extension School in Cambridge, Mass., he dropped his classes this semester. Now, he takes on the frustrations and organization of running the medical tent clinic each day.

One day, Stone wants to be a doctor.

He was supposed to take a medical school entrance exam by the end of December; instead, he put his future on hold for a simple reason: When he came to the southern Mississippi coast five days after the storm, medical needs were everywhere, medical services were nowhere to be found.

"There was nothing here," said Stone, who came expecting to spend a few days working with FEMA or the Red Cross. "I couldn't not be here. People were desperate."

Instead, he found only dead animals and dead bodies. He heard horror stories of residents climbing out of their roofs to survive.

He's been here ever since, helping those who don't know where else to go, recruiting volunteer medical workers to come and do the same.

The local hospital, Hancock County Medical Center, was knocked unconscious during Katrina. Otherwise, patients must travel 42 miles to Slidell, La., or 35 miles to Gulfport, Miss.

Seeing a need after the storm, Stone set up a first aid station on the asphalt in 120-degree heat. It evolved into a free clinic serving 50 to 60 patients per day.

The first doctor showed up from Georgia one day. Stone e-mailed, pleaded, begged and called to find a steady stream of doctors.

In the tent, Stone has worked beside medical students from Nebraska, pharmacists from Indiana, a Stanford University Medical Center professor.

And now, Roth and Steffe.

Ann Lathrop, a 40-year-old teacher from nearby Bay St. Louis, visited the clinic for an ear infection and sore throat. She lay sick in her FEMA trailer -- her "condo in the front yard" -- not knowing where to go.

Her own doctor had an office on the beach -- a place she assumes is no longer there. A student told her about the medical tent, which sent her away with three bottles of Robitussin and some pills.

"This place is better than a real doctor's office," she said. "I can't say enough good things about these volunteers who came down here to help us."

Lathrop waved at the receptionist as she left the tent.

"Thank you," she called. "You're wonderful."

Yet Stone plans to close the clinic by Dec. 1, leaving the work to two other free clinics in the Waveland area -- a population, he says, where 60 percent are uninsured. The Hancock County Medical Center is partially up and running, with a working emergency room and 20 beds.

Stone plans to return to Chicago to see his mother and father, then return to Cambridge when the spring semester begins. He plans to return to his new, $1,100-a-month apartment he has only seen once, but for which he still pays rent. In the summer, he hopes to return to his job as an ambulance EMT, tending to the city's north side as he's done for three years.

But until he leaves, there is work to be done.

"Brad," a medical student calls as he walks out for lunch. "Don't leave yet."

And this time next year, long after the medical tent is gone and he moves out of the abandoned condo where he now lives, Brad Stone will apply to medical school.