Honoring Black History Month: Dr. Charles Harris, CNRV Chief of Staff, Shares His Experience as a Surgeon

February is Black History Month, when we celebrate the many significant contributions of Black Americans throughout history, and a perfect time to highlight the journeys of our own Black employees and their contributions to our mission.

This month Charles Harris, M.D., chief of staff for Carilion New River Valley Medical Center (CNRV), shared some of his experiences in health care with us.

Dr. Harris joined Carilion in 2008 and has spent more than a decade in surgical practice at CNRV. While he is originally from Ohio, Dr. Harris has fond memories as a child of visiting his family’s farm on Bent Mountain in Roanoke County and always had a fondness for the area.

However, growing up in the 1950s amid segregation, it never occurred to him to be a doctor.

“I didn’t even think that job was open to Black people,” Dr. Harris said. “To me a doctor looked like white men on television shows, like Ben Casey or Marcus Welby.”

It wasn’t until 1958—when he was six years old—that he saw a Black doctor. It was that doctor who had made a house call to care for the young Dr. Harris, who inspired him toward a medical vocation.

By the 1960s, especially after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. Harris said he began to feel more empowered as he witnessed more Black representation in government, in the media and on TV shows such as “Julia,” which featured a Black nurse in a lead role.

Dr. Harris also credits his mother for his desire to become a physician. She had returned to college to complete her B.A. and ultimately earned her Ph.D., which was rare for women of that time—rarer still for Black women—and valued higher education. Because of her, Dr. Harris and his brother share a lifelong love of reading and learning.

“Dr. Harris has been an excellent physician and a leader to our staff and surgical students,” said Dr. Michael Nussbaum, senior vice president and chair of the Department of Surgery. “He teaches compassion and empathy and reminds our caregivers to bring their human side to the bedside.”

Dr. Harris attended Macalester College in Minnesota followed by medical school at Howard University, where he studied under Dr. LaSalle Leffall, who later served as the first Black president of the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons.

Dr. Harris initially did a military internship in Family Practice, but changed his mind out of a desire to provide more definitive care.  After resigning from Family Practice, he was assigned command of a medical company in Germany in 1980, where he developed a passion for general surgery.

After Germany, he studied surgery in Hawaii and then fulfilled his military obligation at the Pentagon, freeing him to serve as a missionary with his family in Haiti in 1988. The young Harris family had to flee the country with just the clothes on their backs after a coup d’état in late 1991 led to government upheaval. Dr. Harris then found himself back in Virginia and finished his surgical residency at the University of Virginia in 1996. His love of being a surgeon and improving the health of the community has never wavered.

“I enjoy being able to intervene in a crisis,” he said. “You see patients suffering and days later they’re talking to you. You’ve done something that helps them get back to their life again. I never tire of that feeling.”