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ER Doctor Builds Career on a Promise
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Emergency medical physician Sampson Davis is giving back to the community where he grew up and fulfilling a pact he made with 2 of his high school friends.
If you ask Sampson Davis, MD, what it was like growing up in Newark, NJ, he will pull no punches in describing it as the 1980s Hunger Games.
“I was always caught in this warped world that I was born into,” Davis recalls. “And as a kid, I didn’t know any different. I didn’t realize that I was living in poverty. I didn’t realize that it was crime riddled with despair and desperation. It was only as I started to get older that I realized that my reality wasn’t everybody’s reality; that the world that I was living in was a warped world, if you will, and that in order for me to not fall into that, I had to find a way to escape.”
Davis did escape, but not in the literal sense. He rose above the fray to graduate from nearby Seton Hall University, obtain his medical degree from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and complete his residency in emergency medicine at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center—the same hospital where he was born.
Today, as a board-certified emergency medical physician at St. Michaels Medical Center in Newark, he’s giving back, and fulfilling a pact he made with 2 of his high school friends.
