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When Carson arrived at Johns Hopkins Hospital — ranked the top hospital in the country for two decades — as a neurosurgery resident in 1977, he said that he was sometimes mistaken for an orderly.

“It wasn’t deliberately racist,” he told the New York Times in 1993. “It’s just that orderlies were the only black hospital employees these people had ever seen before.”

Carson soon began collecting an impressive set of credentials: assistant professor of neurosurgery, assistant professor of oncology, and, at age 33, director of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery. He was then the nation’s youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery, and one of only three black doctors in that position in the United States.

“He could walk into the patient’s room the evening before surgery, meet the parents for the first time, speak to them for a few minutes, and it was as if God had entered the room,” the late Dr. John Freeman, an internationally renowned Johns Hopkins pediatric neurologist, wrote in his self-published memoir Looking Back: A Career in Child Neurology.

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