Fellow Doctor on Carson’s Stabbing Story: ‘Yeah I Absolutely Believe It’s True‘

PRINCE: "Well, it was, you know, long after it happened. I think it happened when he was 14 years old, but it was also quite a bit of time before a book, before a movie, and before a would be president. And we were in the surgical lounge and we were talking about what led us to become physicians, it’s kind of a common conversation for people to have, and at that time I thought he was a resident just like me, because he looked so young and I had come into it a little older because I had done electrical engineering in the interim, and I thought he was at my level. You know there is a hierarchy at Hopkins, and I probably wouldn’t have been having a personal conversation had I known that he was already attending and chief of pediatric neurosurgery, but of course he took the fast track, and uh, but he was a very approachable and humble guy. We just had a personal conversation at about three in the morning waiting for a patient to come down and, he told me that story, and in fact, I had never heard the story after that because I didn’t read the book, I didn’t watch the movie, and in fact, just now, when you played that little tape of him telling the story, that’s the first time I’ve actually heard it aside from him almost 30 years ago, and I saw it on CNN that they were questioning the veracity of that story. And I thought, ‘well wait a minute, you know, why would he tell lowly me, before he could possibly have known that he would be a famous neurosurgeon if it wasn’t true. 

What I remember is the knife hitting the belt buckle. And that it was a life changing, sort of religious, experience for him, where he could have gone one way or the other, and he chose the good way. And it was a self-deprecating story, it wasn’t a story to aggrandize him, people like hearing rags to riches story, but I don’t think they like hearing criminal to riches stories. This isn’t a story that you tell if you running for president for example. This is just a very important moment in his life, and I recognized that. It was clearly a big deal for him at the time, and yeah I absolutely believe it’s true, and there’s really no reason for him to tell a story like that, like I said, before any of this fame came to him. He had nothing to gain by impressing me. It w.as in context of the discussion that we were having. The funny thing about this guy is that this guy tells you you’ve got a tumor in your head and he needs to go inside and get it out you’re gonna believe him, right? So the idea that people are questioning his credibility when of course if it was your child you would say ‘oh yeah, yeah, yeah, just, you know, go into his head, it’s fine."