Simeon Lewis Carson

Simeon Lewis Carson (1882-1954) became one of McDowell County’s most notable African American sons as a daring surgeon, founder of a hospital and a professor at Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Carson was born on a farm near Marion, the youngest son of illiterate parents, Martin and Harriet Carson, former slaves of John H. Carson. As a youth, along with other members of his extended family, Simeon Carson, migrated to Ann Arbor, MI, where he graduated from high school. At the age of 17 he was admitted to Michigan Medical College in Ann Arbor. Held in admiration by the local Black community, he graduated at the head of his class. He received his M.D. degree in 1903 and became the first black youth from Ann Arbor to graduate from the medical school. In a competitive examination he obtained a post as a government physician on the Sioux Reservation a Lower Brule, S. D. where he worked for the next five years. During this time period, he married a graduate of Wilberforce University. In 1908, following his selection from among fifty-two applicants for the position of assistant surgeon-in-chief at Freedman’s Hospital (later known as Howard University Hospital) in Washington, DC, Carson and his wife re-located to Washington where they were to live for the remainder of their lives.

During the ten years Carson practiced medicine at Freedman’s Hospital, he became noted for his skill and dexterity as a surgeon As the first doctor in the District of Columbia to use spinal anesthesia in major surgery, he was among the first Black doctors to be invited to practice and demonstrate his techniques in white hospitals in Washington and Pittsburgh. He was also hailed as the first surgeon to use the Parker-Kerr basting stitch in an appendectomy—later accepted as routine practice. In 1919, in response to racial discrimination in the capitol that excluded black doctors and patients from first class hospitals. Dr. Carson founded “Carson’s Private Hospital.” Intellectually fascinated with socialist theory, for sixteen years his hospital provided excellent medical service to people of African descent from all over the United States at nominal cost: the fee for major minor surgery and a two week stay in the hospital was $150. All staff, inclusive of head nurse, were paid identical salaries.

For seven years prior to selling his hospital in 1938, he returned to the professorship of clinical surgery in the medical school of Howard University Hospital. In semi-retirement until final illness and death, Dr. Carson also continued to assist at surgeries at Adams Hospital in Washington, an institution he helped to found and to whom he gave the equipment from the Carson Private Hospital.