The Youngest Science

From the 1920s when he watched his father, a general practitioner who made housecalls and wrote his prescriptions in Latin, to his days in medical school and beyond, Lewis Thomas saw medicine evolve from an art into a sophisticated science. The Youngest Science is Dr. Thomas's account of his life in the medical profession and an inquiry into what medicine is all about--the youngest science, but one rich in possibility and promise.

He chronicles his training in Boston and New York, his war career in the South Pacific, his most impassioned research projects, his work as an administrator in hospitals and medical schools, and even his experiences as a patient. Along the way, Thomas explores the complex relationships between research and practice, between words and meanings, between human error and human accomplishment, More than a magnificent autobiography, The Youngest Science is also a celebration and a warning--about the nature of medicine and about the future life of our planet.

The Youngest Science - Lewis Thomas 1. Amity Street
2. House Calls
3. 1911 Medicine
4. 1933 Medicine
5. 1937 Internship
6. Leech Leech, Et Cetera
7. Nurses
8. Neurology
9. Guam and Okinawa
10. Itinerary
11. NYU Pathology
12. NYU Bellevue Medicine
13. The Board of Health
14. Endotoxin
15. Cambridge
16. The Governance of a University
17. Rheumatoid Arthritis and Mycoplasmas
18. MSKCC: The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
19. Olfaction and the Tracking Mouse
20. Illness
21. Scabies, Scrapie
22. Essays and Gaia
AppendixLewis Thomas was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, he was the dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. He wrote regularly in the New England Journal of Medicine, and his essays were published in several collections, including The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, which won two National Book Awards and a Christopher Award, and The Medusa and the Snail, which won the National Book Award in Science. He died in 1993.