While there he developed an interest in poetry and literary humor, writing much "good bad verse," as he described it in
The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (1983), for
The Princeton Tiger. These poems reveal his sense of humor about undergraduate life while exhibiting no particular interest in the natural world.
After earning a B.S. from Princeton in 1933, Thomas enrolled at Harvard Medical School. During the early 1930s medicine was becoming a clinical science, and antibiotics were soon to be developed. After graduating cum laude in 1937, Thomas served an internship at Boston City Hospital (1937-1939). During that time he supported himself by donating blood and publishing a dozen poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and The Saturday Evening Post. Most of these poems are about medical experiences, death, and war. Near the end of a residency in neurology at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center (1939-1941) he married Beryl Dawson, whom he later called his editorial collaborator, on 1 January 1941. Over the next eight years they had three daughters: Abigail, Judith, and Eliza.
Thomas began his medical career as a research fellow in neurology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratories. In 1942 he was called for active service with the U.S.
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