Watch: A rebel with a cause: As a mentor and a leader, this Black orthopedic surgeon fights to diversify his field
A rare Black orthopedic surgeon in an overwhelmingly white specialty, Eric Carson has spent decades mentoring Black and Hispanic students hoping to enter his field. But there was one story surgeon Eric Carson had never shared.
It happened when he was a trainee at Harvard, a pinnacle position he had reached after a tough childhood growing up in public housing in the nearby Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and enduring tense years during the city’s court-ordered school desegregation. He’d beaten the odds that claimed the futures of many he’d grown up with and made it to Tufts University as a scholar-athlete. He’d then entered medical school at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
