A short life of the author
Lewis Thomas was a physician, medical researcher, and administrator who, in his early sixties, began writing short essays about biology and medicine for the New England Journal of Medicine — and discovered, to his surprise and everyone else’s, that he was one of the finest essayists in the English language. His essays, collected in The Lives of a Cell (1974), The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and subsequent volumes, are brief, luminous, and startlingly original — meditations on everything from the symbiotic lives of cells to the meaning of death, from the social behaviour of ants to the nature of language, written with a combination of scientific authority and literary elegance that has no real parallel in American nonfiction.
The Physician
Lewis Thomas was born in Flushing, New York, in 1913, the son of a general practitioner. He attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1937. He served as a medical officer during World War II, working on infectious diseases. After the war, he pursued a career in academic medicine, serving on the faculties of Tulane, the University of Minnesota, NYU, and Yale, where he was dean of the medical school from 1969 to 1973. He ended his career as president and chancellor of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, one of the most prestigious positions in American medicine.
His research focused on immunology, pathology, and the mechanisms of disease — particularly the role of the body’s own inflammatory responses in causing tissue damage. He was a skilled researcher and an effective administrator, but nothing in his career before the age of sixty suggested that he would become one of the most celebrated writers in America.
The Lives of a Cell
In 1971, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine invited Thomas to write a monthly column. The resulting essays — short, typically 1,200 words, each devoted to a single topic — were unlike anything that had appeared in a medical journal before. They were not technical articles but personal essays, meditations on the wonders of biological life written in a style that owed more to Montaigne than to medical writing.
The first collection, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), won the National Book Award in Arts and Letters and became an unexpected bestseller. The title essay is characteristic of Thomas’s method: beginning with the observation that mitochondria, the organelles that power our cells, were once free-living bacteria that took up residence inside larger cells billions of years ago, Thomas moves to the larger argument that cooperation, not competition, is the fundamental principle of biological life, and that the earth itself is best understood as a single living cell.
This vision — of life as essentially collaborative, of organisms as communities rather than individuals, of the biosphere as a unified living system — runs through all of Thomas’s essays. He anticipated many of the themes of the Gaia hypothesis, holistic biology, and systems ecology, but he expressed them with a lightness and grace that made complex science accessible and emotionally engaging.
The Essayist’s Art
Thomas’s second collection, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979), also won the National Book Award. His subsequent books — Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1983), a more sombre collection shadowed by the nuclear arms race, and Et Cetera, Et Cetera (1990), on the history of language — extended his range beyond biology into philosophy, music, and linguistics.
What made Thomas’s essays distinctive was their combination of scientific precision and philosophical wonder. He wrote about biology as if it were the most astonishing thing in the universe — which, he argued, it was. His sentences have the quality of discovery: you feel the writer’s mind encountering an idea for the first time and following it with delighted surprise. He was often compared to Montaigne for his digressive method and to Thoreau for his attention to the natural world, but his closest literary ancestor is perhaps Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physician-essayist whose prose combined erudition with wonder in a similar way.
The Youngest Science
The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (1983) is Thomas’s autobiography, structured as a history of American medicine from the horse-and-buggy era of his father’s practice to the high-technology medicine of the late twentieth century. It is one of the finest memoirs of medical life ever written, and its argument — that modern medicine is still “the youngest science,” still more uncertain and more dependent on luck than its practitioners like to admit — remains bracingly relevant.
Collecting Thomas
The Lives of a Cell (Viking, 1974) in first edition with dust jacket is the key Thomas title. First editions of The Medusa and the Snail (Viking, 1979) and Late Night Thoughts (Viking, 1983) are also collected. All are relatively common in the book trade, but fine copies with unclipped jackets and no remainder marks command steady prices among collectors of American essays and science writing.