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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.
“The tragedy of life is not failing to reach our goals,”
Mays said. “It is not having goals to reach.” 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. Bush’s 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 University—he 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 couldn’t refuse: Would Sullivan be
the founding dean of Morehouse’s 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. Sullivan’s life—from Morehouse to the White
House and his ongoing work with medical students in South
Africa—is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the
civil rights movement fought to achieve. His story should
inspire future generations—of all backgrounds—to aspire to
great things.
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