But though Walker Percy dabbled in writing during his school years (he sold sonnets to less-talented English classmates who needed them for assignments), he turned to science in college. He received a B.A. as a premed chemistry major at the University of North Carolina in 1937 and his M.D. from Columbia University in New York in 1941. It was while he was interning the next year at Bellevue Hospital in New York that serious illness ended his plans for a career in psychiatry. Performing autopsies on derelicts, Percy contracted pulmonary tuberculosis that resulted in two years of invalidism. During this illness, Percy began the extensive philosophical reading that caused him suddenly to see limitations to the scientific method and to find new values in art and humanism.
The early 1940s were a time of much significant change in Percy's personal and philosophical life. Just prior to the onset of his illness, he had ended three years of psychoanalysis; then his Uncle Will died, leaving him financially independent. He made an initial recovery from his illness and attempted to return to Columbia Medical School as a teacher of pathology; but when he suffered a relapse, he returned to a sedentary life and continued to read.
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