While attending high school in his native Colombia, Carlos Mena-Hurtado used to frequently drop in on his older brother Alvaro, who was studying medicine at the University of Antioquia, the nations top medical school and one of the oldest in South America. All of that time in his brothers classes convinced Mena-Hurtado, the son of a social worker and an English teacher, to apply. Though it was a challenge to land one of 40 spots available for 5,000 applicants to the prestigious institution, he was accepted. It was the beginning of a whats become a distinguished career in cardiology.

Cardiology started to grow on me during med school, said Mena-Hurtado, speaking in his office at Yale School of Medicine. What I liked about it was the fact that you can do quick interventions that would change patient outcomes. As he was completing his medical school education in Medelln, he applied for a scholarship that would allow him to continue his training through a series of rotations at institutions outside of his university. One of the possible institutions was Yale.

Yet the young doctor had doubts. It was a long shot, he recalled. I was from a developing country, at a public university, and didnt speak English fluently. So it wasnt necessarily the easiest thing to do.

The best rotation

Mena-Hurtado took the first step, which involved passing board examinations to qualify as a foreign medical student. In the fall of 1999, he worked in a small community hospital in a remote area of Colombia, which was a requirement in his country for having received a free medical education. At the facility, which had only four in-patient beds, Mena-Hurtado typically treated children with respiratory illness or mothers in labor. While he was on-call one night, he heard a knock on the door.

When I opened the door, it was a bunch of armed men asking for the physician on call. I said, Why? And they said, We need that person. So when youre in Colombia and something like that happens, you know you are being taken, he explained.

Dr. Carlos Mena-Hurtado

In Colombia, plagued for decades by revolutionary movements such as the FARC and ELN, kidnappings were not uncommon. That night, Mena-Hurtado understood that he and his best friend, also a physician, were seized because they had valuable medical skills. He later learned that his captors had recently been in a confrontation with the Colombian army, suffering injuries that required medical attention.

Over the course of his captivity, Mena-Hurtado applied his clinical skills to treating the wounded, sick children, and pregnant women in the guerrilla camps. I had the training, he recalled. The problem is that there were not many resources.

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From Colombia to Yale cardiology: Dr. Carlos Mena-Hurtado