Pioneering black physician James Henry Lewis (1888-1963) was born in North Carolina. Because of limited educational opportunities available to black students there at that time, he moved to Illinois, where he worked to put himself through Wheaton Academy and Wheaton College. After graduating from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and completing an internship at City Hospital in St. Louis, he learned that Harrisburg, then the largest city in southeastern Illinois, needed a black physician. He moved there in 1923 and, in 1927, during the segregated era and because black patients needed a hospital, opened the Lewis Sanatorium at 407 East Walnut Street. There he welcomed all patients without regard to race. He became highly respected in the community, and Harrisburg named Lewis Street in his honor.