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My Life in Medicine
University of Georgia Press
March 2014
On Sale: February 15, 2014
290 pages
ISBN: 0820346632
EAN: 9780820346632
Kindle: B00IBM3Z24
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
While Louis W. Sullivan was a student at Morehouse College, Morehouse president Benjamin Mays said something to the student body that stuck with him for the rest of his life. βThe tragedy of life is not failing to reach our goals,β Mays said. βIt is not having goals to reach.β In Breaking Ground, Sullivan recounts his extraordinary life beginning with his childhood in Jim Crow south Georgia and continuing through his trailblazing endeavors training to become a physician in an almost entirely white environment in the Northeast, founding and then leading the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and serving as secretary of Health and Human Services in President George H. W. Bushβs administration. Throughout this extraordinary life Sullivan has passionately championed both improved health care and increased access to medical professions for the poor and people of color. At five years old, Louis Sullivan declared to his mother that he wanted to be a doctor. Given the harsh segregation in Blakely, Georgia, and its lack of adequate schools for African Americans at the time, his parents sent Louis and his brother, Walter, to Savannah and later Atlanta, where greater educational opportunities existed for blacks. After attending Booker T. Washington High School and Morehouse College, Sullivan went to medical school at Boston Universityβhe was the sole African American student in his class. He eventually became the chief of hematology there until Hugh Gloster, the president of Morehouse College, presented him with an opportunity he couldnβt refuse: Would Sullivan be the founding dean of Morehouseβs new medical school? He agreed and went on to create a state-of-the-art institution dedicated to helping poor and minority students become doctors. During this period he established long-lasting relationships with George H. W. and Barbara Bush that would eventually result in his becoming the secretary of Health and Human Services in 1989. Sullivan details his experiences in Washington dealing with the burgeoning AIDS crisis, PETA activists, and antismoking efforts, along with his efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act. Along the way his interactions with a cast of politicos, including Thurgood Marshall, Jack Kemp, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Helms, and the Bushes, capture vividly a particular moment in recent history. Sullivanβs lifeβfrom Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africaβis the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve. His story should inspire future generationsβof all backgroundsβto aspire to great things.
 Media BuzzDiane Rehm Show - NPR - June 16, 2014
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