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Profile: Clive Orville Callender
Clive Orville Callender. PHOTO/National MOTTEP
Dr. Clive Orville Callender who was born in 1936 is one of the foremost specialists in organ transplant medicine in the United States.
The Howard University Hospital surgeon has focused much of his career on transplant medicine among minority segments of the population, along with the unique health and social issues relevant to them as potential donors.
As a child, he dreamed of becoming a missionary doctor as a result of one sermon he witnessed at Ebenezer Gospel Tabernacle: “I was listening to the minister who spoke about the two greatest occupations in the world: ministering to the souls of mankind and to the bodies of mankind,” he told Black Enterprise in 1988. Callender enrolled in New York City’s Hunter College, and had earned degrees in chemistry and physiology by 1959. From there, he entered Nashville’s Meharry Medical College, a prestigious school that had long been an important training ground for African-American doctors and medical professionals. Callender graduated first in his class there in 1963.
