Dr. Louis Wade Sullivan (1933- ) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Walter Sullivan (1883-196?) and Lubirda Elizabeth Priester (1902-1978). He attended Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta; graduated magna cum laude from Morehouse College in 1954 and cum laude from Boston University School of Medicine, where he studied internal medicine and hematology, in 1958. Sullivan married attorney Eva Ginger Williamson in 1955, and they moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, to raise their three children: Paul, Shanta, and Halsted. After teaching medicine in and around Boston, Massachusetts, between 1963 and 1975, Dr. Sullivan moved back to Atlanta to become the first dean and president of the Morehouse Medical Education Program. The school became independent in 1981 and was renamed the Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM). He held the position of president of MSM until 2002, except between 1989-1993 when he worked as the Secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President George H.W. Bush. In 2003, Dr. Sullivan developed a virtual textbook called TOPMED (Topics in Pain Medicine). Dr. Sullivan published his autobiography, Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine, in 2014.