Louis W. Sullivan - Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine

BREAKING GROUND

MY LIFE IN MEDICINE

Dr. Louis W. Sullivan

with David Chanoff Foreword by Ambassador Andrew Young

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the
Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder, Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted
her life to the relief and education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia.

Published by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
2014 by Louis W. Sullivan and David Chanoff
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sullivan, Louis Wade, 1933
Breaking ground : my life in medicine / Dr. Louis W. Sullivan with
David Chanoff ; foreword by Ambassador Andrew Young.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8203-4663-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8203-4663-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Sullivan, Louis Wade, 1933 2. African American physiciansBiography.
3. PhysiciansUnited StatesBiography. 4. United States. Department of
Health and Human ServicesOfficials and employees. 5. Morehouse School
of Medicine. I. Chanoff, David. II. Title. III. Title: My life in medicine.
R695.S85 2014
610.92dc23 [B]
2013029150

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4693-9
Frontispiece: Visiting Brown Hospital, El Paso, Texas, 1990,
as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services

I am privileged to dedicate this publication of my lifes story to my wife,
Ginger, who has shared so much of this with me, with unconditional love and
support in all my endeavors. I also dedicate this to my parents,
Walter W. Sullivan Sr. and Lubirda Priester Sullivan, who gave me life,
a strong legacy, inspiration, and a clear value system. The core of who I am
emanates from these beloved persons who are so important to me.

, by Andrew Young

When Louis Sullivan was a child in rural south Georgia, the nearest black doctor was forty miles away. Dr. Joseph Griffin was famous in that part of Georgia and revered by the African American community. At the age of five, young Louis decided he wanted to be just like Dr. Griffin. When he grew up he would be a doctor, taking care of people who had no one else to take care of them.

Louis Sullivan did become a doctor. He never fulfilled his youthful desire to practice medicine in one of the small Georgia communities that are still, today, seriously lacking in health care. But he turned that early dream into a career that has protected and enhanced the health, not just of the poor and underserved, but of all Americans.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most effective and influential secretaries of Health and Human Services in that departments history, Sullivan was a leader in the war against AIDS and smoking and catalyzed the ongoing national effort to make the fight for good health something each of us can take responsibility for in our own lives. He has helped teach America that above all else health care means staying well, which is largely in our own hands, not sick care, which we have to leave to doctors and hospitals.

Today everyone knows that exercise, eating properly, and not smoking enhance health, but we forget that not so long ago these concepts were not considered truths, but unproven, easily ignored assertions. As secretary, Sullivan was instrumental in changing our national mindset about how the way we live our lives affects how we do, or do not, keep ourselves healthy.

Sullivan changed the face of American health care in other ways as well. When he took office as the countrys second black HHS secretary (and the only African American in George H. W. Bushs cabinet), research relating to the health of women and minorities was shamefully neglected. At NIH Sullivan established the Office of Research on Womens Health and the Office of Research on Minority Health (now the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities). To help ensure that programs addressing the health needs of women and minorities were not neglected and shunted aside he appointed highly qualified women and minorities to leadership positions in what had previously been a male-dominated and essentially lily-white government health establishment. In doing so he helped break the glass ceiling that had relegated the talent of the nations women and minorities to secondary and less than fully productive roles.

Sullivans commitment to the health of Americas neediest was incorporated in the health reform legislation rolled out by the elder Bush administration in early 1992. When Sullivan took office as HHS secretary, thirty-seven million mostly poor Americans did not have health coverage. Sullivans overarching concern as secretary was to remedy that. The health care reform plan devised under his direction provided coverage and at the same time attacked escalating health costs. As a plan developed by a Republican administration and encompassing the Democratic push for universal coverage, it would have allowed the country to avoid the vicious partisan conflicts that characterized both the Clinton and Obama health care reform efforts.

In a career that has spanned the gamut from clinician to biomedical scientist to public health leader, Lou Sullivans signature accomplishment has without doubt been the Morehouse School of Medicine, the nations first predominantly black medical school in more than a century. As Morehouse School of Medicines founding dean and longtime president, Sullivan built an institution from which many graduates go on to practice in inner cities and rural communities where the need is greatest. Recently ranked the number one medical school in the country in terms of social mission, Morehouse exerts an influence far beyond its size in addressing the nations critical need for primary care physicians.

I am proud to have played a role in the early years of the Morehouse School of Medicine when in 1975, as the congressman from Atlanta, I introduced the dean of this new institution to my fellow members of Congress, who subsequently provided financial and moral support to the schools growth and development.

Lou Sullivan has always believed that addressing the health requirements of the countrys neediestits minorities and poorwill bring the greatest benefit to society as a whole. That was the theme of his tenure as secretary, and that has been the impact of the medical school he founded. In this book he writes with clarity, passion, and humor about the life he has led and the issues that dominate our current health care debates. Now in his early eighties, Sullivan remains one of the medical worlds wisest and most inspirational public voices.

ANDREW YOUNG

In the little town of Blakely, Georgia, my father, Walter W. Sullivan Sr., buried the black people. It wasnt that the white undertaker, Mr. Minter, would deny blacks his services. But in that place at that time even death was segregated. At the white funeral home African American loved ones would have to go in around back. And black customers would take their last ride, not in Mr. Minters hearse but on his flatbed mule-drawn wagon. It was not a dignified ending, which was why, before my father came to town, deceased African Americans were often buried by a black mortician in Albany, fifty miles easta considerable inconvenience for family and friends.