Doctor works to get more Black men into medical field

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) – During this Black History Month, WAVY spoke with a local doctor who is on a mission to get more Black men interested in joining the medical field.

Dr. Steven Noble is a cardiothoracic surgeon with Chesapeake Regional Healthcare. He said he fell in love with the medical field when he was just five years old.

“I can remember being on my grandparents living room floor just flipping through the transparency pages of the encyclopedia they had, and I was just really fascinated with the human body,” Noble said. “My path to medicine was just really trying to answer those questions: Why do people get old? Why do people die? Why do people get sick? Why do they go to the hospital?

“That fascination with the human body, why things worked, why peoples’ bodies broke down, really got me involved in medicine. So, I told my family that I wanted to be a doctor, and ever since then, they just really put me on that path.”

He chose to further his education at a HBCU.

“When it came time to go to college, I decided to go to Xavier University in Louisiana, as it was number one for putting Blacks in the medical school,” Noble said. “Going down there to Xavier was just an eye opening experience — one of the best decisions I made in my life.”

Noble joined the Navy in 2001 and then went on to medical school at Indiana University. He graduated in 2006 and got out of the Navy in 2018 after deploying to Afghanistan from 2016-2017.

Now, his focus is on diversity in the medical field. Noble said back in 2020, just before the world shut down due to COVID, he attended a conference in Chicago.

“It started with Sen. Dick Durbin giving a talk about someone that I was well familiar with,” Noble said. “He started talking about Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and as a cardiothoracic surgeon, I was like, that’s my hero. So, to hear Senator Durbin give this story about my hero, I was like, ‘wait a minute.’ Not that Senator Durbin didn’t do the man justice, but I just felt like being able to tell that person’s story, Dr. Dan’s story, from a perspective of someone that is is a big fan of Dr. Dan, I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t try and especially understand that reading is kind of how I came into my love for medicine.”

So, Noble began to write a children’s book titled The Heart of a Hero.

“The Heart of a Hero really came from the notion of what an organization called Black Men in White Coats, by Dr. Dale Okorodudu, wants to do,” Noble said, “and that is really looking at trying to increase the numbers of Black men in medicine. Currently, we represent about 2% of individuals in medicine, and that hasn’t significantly changed, and that’s actually less than what it was back in 1978.”

Noble said his book tries to impress upon children that they are their own heroes.

“Other key aspects about this book is just really the trials and tribulations that we all go through, and Dr. Dan suffered some trials and tribulations,” Noble said. “His father passed away when he was a young kid. So being a child without a father growing up was impactful. However, he followed in his father’s footsteps in becoming a barber, and so that aspect of those trials and tribulations, we all go through challenges, but how do we recover? How do we come back from that? What do we do? How does that mold us and shape us for greater things?

“And then the other impact about it is that it takes a village. Dr. Dan really got inspired to pursue medicine by someone that walked into his barbershop. So, as a 17-year-old man, he was an entrepreneur and had a barbershop when a White man walked into his barbershop. It was actually a surgeon in the Union Army that fought against slavery, and it was that general, General Palmer, that really took Dr. Dan underneath his wing and saw that Dr. Dan had an interest in medicine and really cultivated that passion that he had. So Dr. Dan goes on to medical school, but perhaps one of his greatest feats is starting an interracial hospital in Chicago in the 1800s.

“Individual Black people did not have a hospital that they could go to, but Dr. Dan really realized that for us as a society to take care of the least of us in our society, we all need to come together. So, he got a group of White people, Black people, the whole community, to coalesce around this notion of, let’s create a place of healing in which all people could go to, in particular Black people. So, this hospital was staffed by Black physicians, White physicians, the first hospital, that first training hospital for Black nurses.

“As we know in health care, a lot of the care gets delivered by nurses more so than the actual physicians, and so that training program for Black nurses was key and pivotal. The important thing was it took a whole community, not just Black people to do this, but Black people and White people coming together for the common good. It was some of the things that I saw when I was in the military.

“It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we when we come together for a common good, to have people from different backgrounds, different countries really coming together for this, you know, for the sake of health care, it was really impactful.”

Noble said as a physician and a surgeon, he sees Dr. Dan’s story as not only Black history, but also American history.

“That’s the key thing about this book,” Noble said. “Although, you know, I promote and talk about it during Black history, this book is truly American history, because up until Dr. Dan, we did not have the institutions that we all are aware of today, like Chesapeake Regional, like all the other hospitals that I worked at in which we treat anybody and everybody that comes through those doors.”

The Heart of a Hero is a book for everyone, Noble said.

“I had a great illustrator that really tried to have someone in a wheelchair, all races, all colors,” Noble said. “So, a book for everyone, and just really, that classroom setting and really talking about what it’s like to be a hero, and for children to realize that although we talk about superheroes, that heart of a hero lives inside of them.”

Noble said he geared his book toward third graders.

“It was really an effort to to be intentional with the school-to-prison pipeline,” Noble said. “You know, there’s been talk about really how reading is so impactful on the success of children as they get older. Having five kids myself, I know the impact that early education had for myself. Early education was key. Again, I made that decision when I was five, and so that just kind of set me on a path.

“So I think that as we understand the school-to-prison pipeline, and some of … the factors and some of the things that … lead to mass incarceration, I think we have to be as intentional to combat that in other ways. This is my humble attempt to be intentional to that notion and producing the book to really inspire the next generation of physicians, Black, white, or otherwise, to really pursue medicine, but in particular young Black men.”

Noble is excited to think about the impacts more Black physicians could have on quality of care.

“I think it’d be tremendous, and I think not only would it be impactful for Black men and Black women, but just the country in general,” Noble said. “You know, I firmly believe that this country also owes a lot to the Black community, and truly the backbone of this community. I feel that just like with our own bodies, if you strengthen your back, the rest of the body is going to be helpful.

“So, I think that if we strengthen and improve the health of the Black community, the rest of the community is going to be impacted, and the rest of the community is going to improve because of that.

“As it relates to getting more Black men and Black women, again, that interaction, that communication, 90% of what we as physicians and health care providers can kind of figure out is from the history. So if there is a disconnect in the dialog that occurs because of whatever reason, language barrier or cultural barriers, prejudice or just racism, then there’s going to be an issue as such that when the patient is communicating their signs and symptoms, it may not either be believed or there may just be a disconnect.

“So being able to have more empathetic providers, being able to have people or doctors understand the person sitting right across from them is very key, because most of the healing and what we know comes from that history, and if we struggle to have that history, if we struggle to just be able to open up in conversation with someone that doesn’t look like us, that can lead to some of these barriers that we see. So the hope is that by having more Black physicians, that those barriers can be lowered, that those conversations can be had, that we don’t have situations of individuals having health care diseases in which they don’t communicate.”

If you are interested in purchasing Noble’s book, click here.