As a newly-minted resident physician in New York during the late 1980s, I first learned from afar about a certain distinguished neurosurgeon from Baltimore named Benjamin Solomon Carson. Although medical journal articles are the traditional way for most medical doctors to get the latest news about breakthroughs and advances in the field, I became acquainted with Dr. Carson’s early contributions to medicine and humanity during a morning ritual known to all doctors as “morning rounds.”

There I was, on morning bedside rounds during a pediatric rehabilitation residency-training rotation at Albert Einstein-Kennedy Institute Hospital, when my supervising attending physician boldly announced that medical history had been dramatically made. A pair of twins joined at the head (“conjoined twins”) had been masterfully separated by a pioneering Johns Hopkins physician after a 22-hour grueling and history-making surgical procedure.