Passage 2
Lewis Thomas was born in 1913 in Flushing, New York to a
family physician and his nurse wife. He was fascinated by his father’s
profession, and it became a baseline for his later understanding of the dramatic
changes, not always good ones in his opinion, in the practice of medicine in the
twentieth century. He entered Princeton at 15 where he was an average student,
but he developed an interest in poetry and literary humor, writing much "good
bad verse," as he described it, for the Princeton Tiger, which showed primarily
his sense of humor about undergraduate life but no particular interest in the
natural world. He was admitted to Harvard Medical School in
1933, at the time when medicine was changing dramatically into a clinical
science and antibiotics would soon be developed. During his internship at Boston
City Hospital he supported himself by donating blood and publishing a dozen
poems in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Saturday Evening
Post. (71) He completed a residency in neurology at the
Columbia Presbyterian Medieal Center and married Beryl Dawson, whom he later
called his editorial collaborator, in 1941. He began his medical
career as research fellow in neurology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratories.
He was called for service in 1942 with the Naval Reserve as a medical researcher
assigned to the Pacific. (72) His developing interest in
immunological defense mechanisms became the base of his later research; he would
later write a long essay on it, "On Disease," in The Medusa and the
Snail. In 1948 Thomas went to Tulane University as a researcher
in microbiology and immunology. He was noted for his creativity and ability to
generate original hypotheses. (73) He became head of the
pathology department at New York University Medical School in 1954, where over
the next fifteen years he helped transform immunology into a clinical science
and built unusually collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams. He would
also chair the Department of Medicine at Bellevue Hospital. (74)
However, he never abandoned his clinical and research concerns, and
moved to Yale in 1969 to continue research in the pathogenesis of mycoplasma
diseases. In 1971, while Thomas was chairman of the Department
of Pathology at the Yale Medical School, his friend Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the
editor Of the New England Journal of Medicine, asked him to write a monthly
essay, called "Notes of a Biology Watcher." Each essay would be about 1,000
words, firing a page of the Journal; there would be no pay, but there would also
be no editing of his work. (75) A. Lewis
Thomas died in 1993 after a life of remarkable accomplishment.
B. After the war he went to Johns Hopkins to practice pediatrics and
conduct research on rheumatic fever. C. He became Dean of the
NYU School of Medicine, beginning an administrative career. D.
Most of these lyrical poems were about medical experiences, death, and
war. E. In 1950 he joined the University of Minnesota to
continue his research on rheumatic fever. F. That was a deal
that Thomas said he could not resist.