Ben Carson, MD: In His Own Words

I had never heard of Ben Carson until two years ago when I watched a movie starring Cuba Gooding as a doctor who endured racism as an intern and resident until he achieved respect as a neurosurgeon. Only at the end of the film did I learn this was the true story of a doctor who currently practiced at Johns Hopkins, one of the most esteemed hospitals in the country.

Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about Carson until last month when I heard that his keynote speech at last month’s National Prayer Breakfast caused a furor on The Left because he had the audacity to criticize our growing national debt and healthcare crisis while the architect of both problems was sitting a scant five feet away from the podium. Philosophically, however, they were separated by light years.

Ben Carson was born in Detroit 61 years ago to a functionally illiterate mother. Poor and black, Ben and his older brother Curtis had ready-made excuses to be victims. But they were blessed with a mother who refused to let either of them under-achieve.

I had a mother who would never allow herself to be a victim no matter what happened. Never made excuses, and she never accepted an excuse from us. And if we ever came up with an excuse, she always said do you have a brain? And if the answer was, yes, then she said then you could have thought your way out of it. And it was the most important thing she did for my brother and myself. Because if you don’t accept excuses, pretty soon [you] stop giving them, and start looking for solutions. And that is a critical issue when it comes to success.

Carson’s mother taught her boys the rewards of hard work by her own example.

My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn't want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. And, so she worked very hard. Sometimes we didn't see her for several days at a time, because she would go to work at five in the morning and get back after 11:00 p.m., going from one job to the next.

But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like, and she was also extremely thrifty. She would go to the Goodwill, she'd get a shirt that had a hole and put a patch on it and put another one on the other side to make it look symmetrical, and she sewed her own clothes.

She would take us out in the country on a Sunday and knock on a farmer's door and say, "Can we pick four bushels of corn, three for you and one for us?" and they were always glad at that deal. And she'd come home and she'd can the stuff, so that we would have food.

Ben Carson’s mother, Sonya, was one of 24 children. She had only a third grade education and had married at age 13, learning only after her two boys were born that the reason her husband traveled so much on his “job” was because he had another family. He was a bigamist. While the boys were only adolescents their parents’ divorce pushed the family deeper into poverty.

Where [we lived] you walk into a room and turn on the light switch and it looked like the wall was moving because there were so many roaches, and rats that were big enough to move garbage cans, and sirens and gangs and people lying in the street with bullet holes in their chest … [that’s] how my two cousins that we lived with got killed.

Despite his aspiration to be a doctor, young Ben Carson was not a good student.

I was a horrible student. But, you know, like many students, I kind of envisioned myself as a doctor anyway, despite the fact that I wasn't doing well. We lived in the inner city, single parent home, dire poverty… I was perhaps the worst student you've ever seen. I thought I was really stupid. All my classmates and teachers agreed, and my nickname was "Dummy."

The family’s extreme poverty caused Ben to have such low self-esteem that he developed a violent temper which caused frequent fights.

Another youngster angered me, and I had a large camping knife and I tried to stab him in the abdomen, and fortunately he had on a large metal belt buckle under his clothing and the knife blade struck with such force that it broke and he fled in terror. But, I was more terrified as I recognized that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing. I realized at that moment that with a temper like that, my options were three: reform school, jail, or the grave.

None of the options appealed to me. So, I just locked myself up in the bathroom and I started praying and I said, "Lord, I can't deal with this temper." And, I picked up my Bible and I started reading from the book of Proverbs. That was the first day that I started doing it, and I've been doing it every day since then because it had all these verses in it about anger, and it seemed like they were all applicable to me. And, while I was [in the bathroom], I had a revelation and that revelation was that the reason I was always angry is because I was always in the center of the equation. So, just step out of the center of the equation and then everything won't be directed at you, and then you won't be angry, and also, you'll be able to look at things from other people's points of view.

As a domestic servant, Carson’s mother observed that the wealthy families whose children she cared for watched little television. So she began rationing her boys to three TV shows per week and insisted that each boy fill his time instead by checking out two books from the Detroit Public Library and submit weekly written book reports to her. She appeared to read them and made checks marks in the margins. They didn’t know at the time that she couldn’t read.

I started to enjoy [reading] because we had no money, but between the covers of those books, I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything. And, I began to learn how to use my imagination more because it doesn't really require a lot of imagination to watch television, but it does to read. You've got to take those letters and make them into words, and those words into sentences, and those sentences into concepts, and the more you do that, the more vivid your imagination becomes. And, I believe that's probably one of the reasons that you see that creative people tend to be readers, because they're exercising their mind.

In time, the Carson family moved so the boys could attend a better neighborhood school – whose students happened to be mostly white. Eventually Ben’s grades improved to the point that he was making an “A” in every subject. While many of his teachers were supportive, some weren’t.

In the eighth grade, I was still at the top of the class and they would give a certificate out at the end of the semester to the student with the highest academic achievement. And, it turned out to be me, but I was the only black student in the class, and the teacher got up in the front and she basically chastised all the other students because they clearly weren't working hard enough. Because, how in the world could a black student be number one? I remember the band teacher tried to destroy my report card because I had all As and so he got to put a mark on it, so he gave me a C, and he figured by doing that I wouldn't get the award, only to find out that band wasn't included as an academic subject!

Yale offered Ben a scholarship. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in psychology and then attended the University of Michigan Medical School. Initially he planned to do his residency in psychiatry. But that changed.

I realized that I really didn't want to do psychiatry, and I felt that although cardiothoracic surgery was challenging, it didn't offer me enough variety of cases. And then I said, "Well, what's an area where you could become an authority very quickly?" and I said, "The brain, because nobody knows anything about the brain." And, I spent all those years thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist. So, I already knew quite a lot about the brain. So, it was toward the end of my first year in medical school that I decided that neurosurgery was going to be the right field for me.

Carson continued to encounter racism but had learned from his mother to ignore it rather than make an issue about it.

It wasn't difficult for me at all. And it remains not difficult today. I remember when I was an intern, and anytime I would go onto the wards with my scrubs on, one of the nurses invariably would say, you know, "Mr. Jones isn't quite ready to be taken to the O.R. yet," assuming that I was an orderly. I wouldn't get angry, I would simply say, "Well that's nice, but I'm Dr. Carson. I'm the intern." And, you know, they'd turn about 18 shades of red, but I would be very nice to them and understanding, and I had a friend for life. … Rather than blowing up and saying, "How dare you!" … I recognize that the reason they said that was not necessarily because they were racist, but because from their perspective the only black man they had ever seen on that ward with scrubs on was an orderly, so why should they think anything different?

Finishing his residency in neurosurgery, he decided to focus his medical career on children.

Pediatric neurosurgery became fascinating to me … With children, what you see is what you get. You couple that with the fact that I like to do complex things. You can sit there and you can do these enormously complex operations on old people, and it might be successful, and your reward is they live for five years. Whereas with a kid, you do this incredibly complex thing and your reward may be 50, 60 or 70 years. So I like to get a big return on my investment. So, I'd rather go with the kids.

Performing neurosurgical procedures on children is more complex because they are smaller and can’t tolerate the blood loss. On the other hand children have more plasticity than adults – i.e. their neurons haven’t all decided what they want to do when they grow up – so children tolerate radical procedures better. Blessed with extraordinary hand-eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills, Carson revived the practice of hemispherectomies in which half of a child’s brain is removed to correct intractable seizures. Because children can reprogram their brains in order to ambulate and use their limbs, most can lead seizure-free normal lives.

In 1987, Carson made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate German twins conjoined at the back of their Janus-like heads. Normally, one of the twins must be sacrificed to save the other. The parents begged him not to require them to choose which twin would die. But Carson had studied the use of hypothermic arrest which prevented blood loss in surgical procedures on baby hearts. So he applied the technique to separate these twins. In order to perform the procedure, he trained and led a 70-member surgical team which worked for 22 hours. A dramatic scene in the movie, Gifted Hands, occurs when Carson comes out of the surgery to meet the anxious parents and asks them which twin they wanted to hold first.

Ben Carson became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at age 33, the youngest major division director in Johns Hopkins history. He is Co-Director of The Johns Hopkins Craniofacial Center. In 1994 he and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund, a foundation that awards $1,000 college scholarships to students in grades 4 through 11 who excel academically and serve their communities.

While Carson’s surgical workload averaged around 500 procedures annually, as his popularity grew and he accepted more speaking engagements, he had to “cut back” to about 350 surgeries per year.

If you haven’t heard Ben Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast speech, this link will take you to the YouTube video of it. It’s been viewed by over 2.3 million people. He talks a good deal in the first half of his speech about the self-censorship that political correctness causes before getting to the remarks that, judging from his body language, displeased Obama.

Our debt situation …

I’m not politically correct, so I’m sorry, but you know – our deficit is a big problem. Think about it. And our national debt – $16.5 trillion dollars – you think that’s not a lot of money? I’ll tell you what! Count one number per second, which you can’t even do because once you get to a thousand it will take you longer than a second, but…one number per second. You know how long it would take you to count to 16 trillion? 507,000 years – more than a half a million years to get there. We have to deal with this.

Flat taxes …

What about our taxation system? So complex there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle of our tax system. If I wanted to get you, I could get you on a tax issue. That doesn’t make any sense. What we need to do is come up with something that is simple.

When I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the Universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called tithe. Now we don’t necessarily have to do 10% but … [God] didn’t say, if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithes. He didn’t say if you have a bumper crop give me triple tithes. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion dollars you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in $1 – of course, you gotta’ get rid of the loopholes, but now some people say, that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion dollars as much as the guy who made $10. Where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He’s just put in a billion in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him.

And healthcare savings accounts …

We’ve already started down the path to solving one of the other big problems, healthcare. We need to have good healthcare for everybody … but we’ve got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on healthcare, twice as much per capita as anybody in else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?

Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account (HSA) to which money can be contributed, pre-tax from the time you are born, to the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got six diseases, you’re not trying to spend everything. You’re happy to pass it on and nobody is talking about death panels. That’s number one.

For the people who are indigent, who don’t have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we have this huge pot of money … instead of sending it to bureaucracy – let’s put it into HSAs. Now they have some control over their own healthcare and what do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to learn very quickly how to be responsible. When Mr. Jones gets that diabetic foot ulcer, he’s not going to the emergency room and blowing a big chunk of it. He’s going to go to the clinic. He learns that very quickly – gets the same treatment. In the clinic they say, now let’s get your diabetes under control so that you’re not back here in three weeks with another problem. That’s how we begin to solve these kinds of problems.

A self-made black conservative pediatric neurosurgeon lectured an establishment black liberal politician on Bible-based fairness and commonsense last month. For once, Obama apologists couldn’t cry racism.

Ben Carson just announced he will retire from performing surgery in June. He will continue to teach surgery at Johns Hopkins.

Ben and his wife, Candy, he met and married while they attended Yale. Candy has an MBA. Ben’s mother lives with them in Baltimore.

Curtis is an engineer living in Georgia.