Eugene Anson Stead, Jr. was born in Georgia in 1908. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Emory University (B.S., 1928; M.D., 1932) and interned at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston (1934-1937). He was a resident at the Cincinnati General Hospital (1935-1936) and held a faculty position at Harvard University (1938-1941) and the Boston City Hospital prior to becoming the youngest person to chair the Department of Medicine at Emory University (1942). He was named dean of the School of Medicine at Emory University in 1946, but left one year later to become professor of medicine and chair of the Department of Medicine (1947-1967) at Duke University.

Stead is widely known for having established the physician assistant training program at Duke University in 1965. In the 1950s Duke Hospital faced an increased demand for services and a shortage of all types of nursing and allied health personnel. Stead, then chair of the Department of Medicine, envisioned a physician's assistant as a way to provide clinical support to physicians and to allow them to leave their practices to pursue continuing education opportunities. His experience running Emory's Grady Hospital during World War II had convinced him that residents and medical students could be trained to help doctors in patient care. Stead recruited the first students to begin the program at Duke University. The two-year program supplied physicians with knowledgeable personnel who could help meet the growing demand for their services.

As a local and national leader, Stead held many distinguished posts, including president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, founding member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, chairman of the American Heart Association's Ethics Committee, honorary fellow of the American College of Cardiology, and editor of Medical Times, Circulation, and the North Carolina Medical Journal. Some of Stead's published works included Just Say for Me (1968), The Future of Medical Education (1973), The Greater Medical Profession (1972), E. A. Stead, Jr.: What This Patient Needs is a Doctor (1978), Brain Sorting (1983), A Way of Thinking: A Primer on the Art of Being a Doctor (1995), and A Way of Working: Essays on the Practice of Medicine (2001).

Among numerous honors, Stead received the John M. Russell Award of the Markle Foundation, the American College of Physicians Distinguished Teacher Award, the Association of American Medical Colleges' Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education, the Gold Heart Award from the American Heart Association, the Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians, and the Rodman E. and Thomas G. Sheen Award. Stead also received the Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Teacher Award, which is now known as the Distinguished Faculty Award. Emory and Yale University have conferred honorary degrees upon him. In 2003, Stead received the William G. Anlyan, M.D. Lifetime Achievement Award from Duke Medical Alumni Association.

Stead continued to teach and practice at Duke University Medical Center and Durham's Veterans Affairs Medical Center through the mid-1980s, and remained an active member of the Duke community until his death in 2005.