Lewis Thomas ’33, M.D., Humanist in Action

My single, but memorable, encounter with then Yale Medical School Dean Lewis Thomas occurred in his office there in 1972. I was a second-year student, planning to take a year’s leave-of-absence to finish a novel about campus protests and violence after graduating from Princeton in 1970 (when President Nixon expanded the Vietnam war by openly bombing Cambodia).

I received an odd message to report to the dean, who I had never met but knew was a humanist from his book, The Lives of a Cell. When I entered his office, he said without any prelude, “I understand that you want to take a leave of absence from the medical school without having any academic, personal, or family problems. Is that correct?” I answered “yes” and explained that I had hoped to finish my novel in my free time during medical school but had learned I had none and that my unfinished project haunted and distracted me from my studies. He responded, “Well, we have never done this before, letting a student in good standing take such an elective leave. ... I guess you will be our guinea pig!” He dismissed me and wished me luck. The meeting lasted no more than 10 minutes.

My leave began after I completed my required obstetrics and gynecology clinical rotation at University College Hospital in London. There I met a Spanish “charwoman,” whose family owned a vacant summer house that I rented from January to March. Over the next three months, writing every day into the early morning, I completed a first draft.

I then returned home to Wisconsin to help my mother care for her mother after my grandmother had a stroke, returned to Yale on schedule, graduated in 1975, and matched to family medicine residency training in the Bronx at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I have worked ever since, becoming a full professor and associate dean for community engagement.

By the time I returned to Yale, Dr. Thomas had moved on to New York City to lead the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital. His successor, Robert Berliner, M.D., said at our graduation that I and the other six students going into family medicine had “wasted our Yale educations.”

I am grateful that Lewis Thomas gave his blessing to my unprecedented request, so I could become a success as a “guinea pig” and, eventually, as an academic physician myself. Planning that break had banished the suicidal thoughts I had been having. The novel, meanwhile, has been fully revised, praised by a gifted novelist at the New York Writers Institute, and still sits in my office closet waiting for the muse to say, “It’s time to finish.”

Lewis’ first two books, The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail, still sit on my office bookshelf.