Lewis Thomas

American · 1913 to 1993

Lewis Thomas was born on November 25, 1913, in Flushing, Queens, the son of a general practitioner and a nurse. As a boy he often rode along on his father's house calls, watching a doctor of that era treat patients with more honesty than certainty, since so much of what medicine could actually cure did not yet exist. He studied biology at Princeton and graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1937, then served as a Navy medical officer during the Second World War, researching infectious disease in the Pacific on Guam and Okinawa. For the next three decades he worked as a pathologist and immunologist, moving through Johns Hopkins, Tulane, and the University of Minnesota before settling at New York University, where he chaired the pathology department and later became dean of the medical school. He held the same post at Yale, and in 1973 became president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 1971, while at Yale, an editor at The New England Journal of Medicine asked him to write a short monthly column. He called it Notes of a Biology Watcher, and over the next two years filled it with essays about cells, ants, symbiosis, language, and the strange comfort of thinking about the Earth as a single living organism. Gathered into a book in 1974 as The Lives of a Cell, the column made Thomas, at sixty, an unexpected literary figure, and the book won the National Book Award the following year. Five more essay collections followed, along with a memoir of his early career in medicine. Thomas married Beryl Dawson in 1941 and had three daughters, including the writer Abigail Thomas. He died in Manhattan in December 1993, at eighty, of Waldenström's disease, having spent a career moving between the hospital ward and the writing desk without ever quite leaving either one behind.