Paging Dr. Carson

Ben Carson had wanted to be a doctor since he was a child in Detroit in the early nineteen-sixties, but he had the first inkling of what kind of doctor he might be when, as an undergraduate at Yale, he was introduced to Foosball. He played the game “with speed and ease,” he writes in his memoir, “Gifted Hands.” He had “an unusual ability—a divine gift, I believe—of extraordinary eye and hand coordination.” Even after he graduated and went on to medical school at the University of Michigan, a Yale student who made a great Foosball play was said to have scored a “Carson shot.” In the movie version of “Gifted Hands,” broadcast on TNT, in 2009, Cuba Gooding, Jr., as Carson, works the levers with a Jedi-like air—reprised in a later scene in which, during a twenty-two-hour procedure, Dr. Carson separates twin infants conjoined at the head. They were the first ever to survive such surgery.