631

PRESENTATION OF THE JOHN STEARNS AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN MEDICINE TO LEWIS THOMAS, M.D.* SAUL FARBER, M.D. Chairman, Board of Trustees The New York Academy of Medicine Dean, New York University School of Medicine New York, New York

T HE SON OF A PRACTICING PHYSICIAN in Flushing, Queens, Lewis

Thomas has written eloquently about his boyhood exposure to his father's practice and to his understanding of the kinds of help the physician could offer in the years when he was growing up. These early impressions, the perception of medicine as a profession devoted to helping, and the therapeutic power of the physicians' presence, and clear understanding of the lack of efficacy of most of the treatments of the time, combined to energize Lewis Thomas' conception of the medical career, and have continued to shape his activities throughout his professional life. A graduate of Princeton University and of the Harvard Medical School, he holds some 30 honory doctorates in law, science, music, and humane letters. His professional career has been extraordinarily eclectic. After an internship on the Harvard Medical Service at the Boston City Hospital, he spent two years as a resident at the Neurological Institute here in New York City, after which he returned to Boston, where he was Tilney Memorial Fellow at The Thorndike Memorial Laboratory; this was followed during World War II by assignment to The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and The Naval Medical Research Unit headed by Dr. Thomas Rivers. NAMRU I, as it was called, spent a considerable period during the war on Guam and Okinawa. On his return, Dr. Thomas went to the Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins; following a brief period at Tulane he went to the University of Minnesota Medical School as Professor of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine. In 1954 he returned to New York as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pathology at New York University Medical Center, and four years later became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at NYU *Presented at the Stated Meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine May 30, 1991.

Vol. 67, No. 6, November-December 1991

632

632S. S.

FARBER FARBER

LEWIS THOMAS, M. D.

and Director of the NYU Medical Divisions at Bellevue Hospital. From 1966 to 1969 he was Dean of the NYU School of Medicine and then left for New Haven where he accepted appointment to the Chair in Pathology at Yale. Three years later he was Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine. He remained in New Haven until 1973, when he again returned to New York as president of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, of which he became Chancellor in 1980. Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med.

STEARNS AWARD AWARD PRESENTATION OF THE JOHN STEARNS

PRESENTATION OF ThE

JOHN

633

633

Throughout these years he was prodigiously productive in a scientific sense, publishing more than 200 papers on virology, immunology, experimental pathology, and infectious disease. Along the way he found time to serve on NIH Study Sections and Advisory Councils and to serve as a consultant to the Surgeon General of The United States Army, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York, as a member of the Board of Health of the City of New York, and as a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee. Numerous editorial boards have had the benefit of his advice, and prestigious scientific and professional societies have made him a member, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the major research and academic societies in his specialties. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. He has served as a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University and as a Trustee of the Rockefeller University, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. He has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Channel 13, of the Menninger Foundation, and of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, and has served numerous additional institutions as a senior advisor. He has, to the benefit of us all, a probing, curious mind and a diversity of interests. These have been characterized by a remarkably well-tended capacity for wondering, a capacity that in Dr. Thomas has amounted to a substantial talent. He has shared some of his rather well-informed wonderings with us in such volumes as The Lives of a Cell, which received the National Book Award in Arts and Letters, The Medusa and the Snail, which received the American Book Award and the Christopher Award, and, more recently, The Youngest Science, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Etcetera, Etcetera: Notes of a Wordwatcher. Through all these activities Lewis Thomas has taught us something of the possibilities of the energetic, active and engaged mind. He has advanced his field of scientific interest, has strengthened the capacities for service of important institutions, and has enriched his time and our world. I am proud, on behalf of The New York Academy of Medicine, to award the first John Stearns Award for Lifetime Achievement in Medicine to Dr. Lewis Thomas.

Vol. 67, No. 6, November-December 1991

Presentation of the John Stearns Award for lifetime achievement in medicine to Lewis Thomas, M.D.

631 PRESENTATION OF THE JOHN STEARNS AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN MEDICINE TO LEWIS THOMAS, M.D.* SAUL FARBER, M.D. Chairman, Board of Trustees...
761KB Sizes 0 Downloads 0 Views