Inside the Urban Health Crisis With Dr. Sampson Davis

An emergency room physician talks health education.

The Emergency Room Perspective - Health education is more important now than ever according to Dr. Sampson Davis, author of Living and Dying in Brick City, which is an exploration of the health care crisis plaguing urban communities. Davis talked to BET.com about making it out of Newark, New Jersey, giving back to his community and the importance of access to health care. — Dominique Zonyeé (@DominiqueZonyee)(Photo: Ben Hider/Getty Images)
A Pact for Health - Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, an area of high crime and poverty, Dr. Sampson Davis didn’t think his future would include a medical degree. But when a robbery plot gone wrong landed him in a juvenile detention center at 17 years old, Davis saw it as a second chance. He and his two friends, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins, formed a pact to become doctors.(Photo: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)
The Power of the Pact - “I absolutely 100 percent emphatically encourage young brothers to make a pact to do something positive,” Davis told BET.com. He and his friends studied medicine together at Seton Hall University and channeled their energy into helping one another study. “It’s amazing how big you can dream when you surround yourself with likeminded people.”(Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
Giving Back - Davis decided he wanted to be an advocate for health in 1999 after his first few days on the job as an attending emergency room physician at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, the same hospital where he was born.(Photo: Tom Meinelt-Jackson Lee / Splash News)56959513

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A Pact for Health - Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, an area of high crime and poverty, Dr. Sampson Davis didn’t think his future would include a medical degree. But when a robbery plot gone wrong landed him in a juvenile detention center at 17 years old, Davis saw it as a second chance. He and his two friends, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins, formed a pact to become doctors.(Photo: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

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