There’s no evidence that Goethe ever had a “conflict” in the modern sense, or a man like Jung, for instance. You’re not a romantic philosopher—you’re a scientist, [Dick Diver] . . . You’re bored with Zurich and you can’t find time for writing here and you say that it’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 1934(1)
I propose that classical Greek be restored as the centerpiece of undergraduate education. Latin should be put back as well, but not if it is handled, as it ought to be, by the secondary schools. English, history, the literature of at least two foreign languages, and philosophy should come near the top of the list, just below classics, as basic requirements [for medical school].
—Lewis Thomas, 1979(2)
By engaging for four years with the remarkable breadth of the liberal arts, students . . . have an opportunity to prepare themselves not for one profession but for any profession, including those not yet invented.
—Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton, 2010(3)
LEWIS THOMAS, OUR MOST ELEGANT ESSAYIST, wrapped up arts and science in one career. Witty, urbane and skeptical, Thomas may have been the only member of the National Academy of Sciences to have won both a National Book Award and an Albert Lasker Award. He is certainly the only medical school dean whose name survives on a professorship at Harvard, a prize at Rockefeller University and a laboratory at Princeton—and whose books remain in print. Along the way, he worked out the science of immune surveillance, bacterial endotoxemia and intracellular proteolysis gone awry.(4)
Thomas’s work owes much to his unique—and now quaint—coming of age at an Ivy liberal arts college in the early 1930s. His Princeton career followed a path trod by two fictional heroes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, going from Amory Blaine, the Jazz Age rounder of This Side of Paradise (1920), to Dick Diver, the earnest neuropsychiatrist of Tender Is the Night (1934). Thomas and Fitzgerald can serve as models for the union of arts and science in a single, imaginative mind.
The Arts and the Sciences at one point did mean “Paintings and Stuff and Petri Dishes and Stuff,” to quote Zadie Smith,(5) and for a good while, students at American colleges were expected to study both. But, just about the time Lewis Thomas suggested that we install Greek as a centerpiece of undergraduate studies, all that turned around.(6) Nowadays, educators rightly complain that “science and global competition have hollowed out the liberal arts.”(7) In the last decade, undergraduate degrees in trade-oriented fields, such as “parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies,” “security and protective services” and “transportation and materials moving,” have been growing exponentially, all at the expense of general education.(8)
In September of 1929, Lewis Thomas, not yet 16 years old, found himself sitting alone in a freshman dorm at Princeton. On his wire cot was a well-thumbed copy of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his schoolboy primer of college life. To any freshman of bookish bent, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Class of ’17) was a literary idol, and the book’s hero, Amory Blaine, became a guide to conduct among the jeunesse dorée of Princeton. Fitzgerald’s book described how one went about attaining the grand precincts of Prospect Avenue with its smart clubs, easy booze and easier women. Edmund Wilson, the littérateur of the era, described his classmates returning to campus:
When I motored down to Princeton on May Day
With John Bishop and Scott Fitzgerald . . .
Poor Fitz went prancing into the Cottage Club
With his gilt wreath and lyre
Looking like a tarnished Apollo with the two black eyes
That he had got, far gone with liquor, in some unintelligible fight,
But looking like Apollo just the same, with the sun in his yellow hair.(9)
Fitzgerald’s gilt wreath and lyre were notably absent on Dickinson Street, the mean quarters to which Lewis Thomas had been assigned. His digs were a reminder of how quickly Princeton separated its social sheep from unfit goats. Fitzgerald had it right on Amory’s first day in a freshman rooming house:
“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”
“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”(10)
Lewis Thomas knew that Blaine would have regarded him as a sweaty bourgeois. He was, after all, a very young freshman, a doctor’s son from Queens who had attended an obscure day school.(11) He shared quarters with ten other graduates of public or day schools, most of whom, like Lewis, had not been away from their parents for a single night. Most Princeton men were expected to have prepped at boarding schools, fewer to have attended private day schools and fewer still to have come from public schools. Not until 1956 did Princeton matriculate a class, the majority of which had attended public school.
For most of his freshman year, Thomas joined the fictional Amory Blaine in refusing to “get anywhere by working” at the required curriculum of Latin, math and English. As had Blaine, Lewis Thomas “turned into a moult of dullness and laziness, average or below in the courses requiring real work.”(11) He began to take heavy interest in the several ways tobacco could be presented and dismissed athletics as a general waste of effort. However, high spirits and natural wit brought him inevitably to the offices of the Princeton Tiger, an impudent monthly that flourished in the heyday of college humor. Thomas knew that much of the witty stuff that ended up in Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, on the Broadway stage or Hollywood screen had roots in the Princeton Tiger, The Yale Record, the Harvard Lampoon and the Jester of Columbia. That was the league Thomas wanted to play in, and he soon found kindred spirits trying out for the Tiger board. They formed a cadre of clever wits.
At the Tiger, Thomas soon acquired a touch of Coward (Noël), a pinch of Porter (Cole) and a dose of Held (John Jr.). His particular mentor was the future New Yorker cartoonist, Whitney Darrow Jr. (Class of ’31), a fine-tuned humorist whose undergraduate performance was already of concert grade. Thomas flourished under Darrow in the Tiger milieu, and by the end of his first year, he knew that he’d come a long way from that lonely cot in the freshman dorm. He also knew that he’d better study the classics hard to keep up with the “toffs” who’d gotten their Horace in prep school.
Princetonians ate in common dining rooms until their fourth semester, but by sophomore year, they were faced with “bicker,” a rite of initiation into the various Prospect Avenue clubs. As the prestige of one’s club determined one’s place in the social scheme, an anxious sophomore would sit in his room at bicker time, biting his fingernails, anxiously awaiting the moment when the bicker committee of one or another club would knock on the door to vet his manners, wardrobe and genealogy.
Thomas was passed over by the grander clubs and grateful to be picked for the Key and Seal Club, although he knew he had been picked for a club that was, literally, the furthest out on Prospect Avenue. Nevertheless, it was on Prospect Avenue, a tree-clad boulevard of dreams that came to life on football weekends and P-rades, which featured signs proclaiming, “Gentlemen Prefer Bonds—Others Sell Insurance.”(9)
The stock market crashed barely one month after Thomas entered Princeton, but club life on Prospect Avenue went on without skipping a beat. Banks may have failed in Yonkers, but to paraphrase Ira Gershwin, Princetonians were sure that posterity was just around the corner. The horseplay and alcohol were a constant source of friction between the young bloods and the dean of the college, Christian Gauss, a scholar much admired by young Thomas. But on Prospect Avenue, one soon learned that if you wanted to fit in, you shut up about literature and drank your booze. After the crash of 1929, the boys at the clubs drank bootleg gin à la Scott and wife, Zelda, who “went out like a light” after jumping into one or another of New York’s fountains to launch the Jazz Age. Thomas did a piece for the Tiger about that—“Out Like a Light.”(12)
Thomas’s classmates, like Fitzgerald’s, were convinced that without clubs, there would be no Princeton. That conviction trumped wiser counsel. When president of Princeton, in 1907, Woodrow Wilson had called the life of those excluded by the clubs “a little less than deplorable,” warning that Princeton itself was in danger of becoming simply a “background for life on Prospect Avenue.”(13) Wilson’s plan to dismantle the system was defeated by powerful alumni who added a twist of social Darwinism to simple class warfare. Henry Fairfield Osborne (Class of 1877, eugenicist and a great fan of the Master Race) spoke for the opponents of Wilson when he argued that:
Competition is not confined to human rivalries and struggles; it pervades the whole animal kingdom of life; it is the basis of Darwin’s doctrine of evolution; it has been, and ever will be, the means of progressive evolution. . . . To extinguish the spirit of competition is to seek racial suicide.(13)
It took two wars, but Gauss and the liberal scholars prevailed. Social Darwinism may be alive and well in other parts of our country, but Princeton today is a diverse campus, where distinction in the classics has replaced class distinction. There’s also that building named for Lew Thomas, the “sweaty bourgeois” who came of age in the presence of both art and science.
Like many of his classmates, Thomas distrusted untested thought and political rhetoric. He acquired a permanent disdain for dense Germanic thought, recalling that “the only sure memory I retain of Heidegger . . . is pure bewilderment.” On the other hand, he lost his heart and soul to lyric poetry, gobbling up chunks of Longfellow, Holmes, Whitman and the English Romantics. “I once knew Keats, lots of Keats by heart . . .”(14) as in Ode to a Nightingale:
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne.(15)
Tender is the night, indeed. He also toyed for hours with his own attempts at humorous verse and devoured the early work of Evelyn Waugh.
In his senior year, a new passion supervened; Lewis Thomas finally took wings as a “reasonably alert scholar.”(11) He attributed this change to an advanced biology course with Professor Wilbur Swingle, an eminent physiologist who taught Thomas two lessons that stayed with him for a lifetime. The first of Swingle’s teachings was that science begins with the admission of ignorance. Thomas often repeated that admonition, arguing that it would be useful to teach courses in medical ignorance, a curriculum he promoted as a
new and subversive technique for catching the attention of students driven by curiosity, delighted and surprised to learn that science is . . . an “endless frontier.” The humanists, for their part, might take considerable satisfaction watching their scientific colleagues confess openly to not knowing everything about everything. And the poets, on whose shoulders the future rests, might, late nights, thinking things over, begin to see some meanings that elude the rest of us.(16)
The second of Swingle’s lessons was more direct. Thomas learned that experiments done for the sake of curiosity often yield the most practical results. Swingle’s work showed the way. The question of how endocrine glands prepare an organism for survival was a hot item in the early 1930s, a puzzle ready to be solved. Walter B. Cannon had shown that adrenalin of the adrenal medulla played a key role in the “fight or flight” response. But what about that other part of the gland—the adrenal cortex? In 1929, Wilbur Swingle and a student, J. J. Pfiffner, published a paper in The Anatomical Record showing that an aqueous extract of the cortex could keep dogs alive after their adrenals had been removed.(17) It was the beginning of hormone replacement therapy in Addison’s disease, caused in those days chiefly by tuberculosis. Swingle and Pfiffner rapidly followed up this paper with another in Science.(18) Swingle’s extract normalized the body’s delicate balance between sodium and potassium ions, a ratio shown by Jacques Loeb to be crucial for life.(19) Swingle’s work pointed the way to the isolation of deoxycorticosterone (DOC) and eventually, to the even bigger discovery of cortisone. It had a major influence on Thomas’s later experiments with cortisone and inflammation, for which Lewis Thomas received international recognition.(20)
Perhaps for these reasons or perhaps simply because he was growing up and becoming wiser, Lewis Thomas became alert and attentive and began to think seriously about science in general and biology in particular. He once said that he discovered in Swingle’s classroom that biology was the science that made it intellectually respectable to become a doctor.(11) By the end of his senior year, Thomas had become a Biology Watcher.
Impatient with the “romantic philosophies” he’d been taught by humanists at the college, Thomas became a convert to the reductionist views of Edwin Grant Conklin (1863–1952), chairman of the Princeton biology department and fierce opponent of Osborne’s overt racism. A student of invertebrate embryology at Princeton and at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Conklin not only was a Woods Hole colleague of Jacques Loeb but also shared his liberal mechanistic philosophy. Conklin, like Loeb, investigated the physical chemistry of cell division and became an authority about human evolution, popularizing his science in books such as The Direction of Human Evolution (1921) and Problems of Organic Adaptation (1921). Conklin’s irreverent disdain for the notion of a “designed universe” caught Thomas’s fancy. One of Thomas’s undergraduate compositions, which appeared in October of his senior year, is titled “A Disrespectful Note on the Divine Plan.” “L.T.” (Thomas) turns his back on theology and informs us that
By sinning we get lots of things
To entertain us when we’re bored,
But labored virtue only brings
Virtue as its own reward
I think it futile of the Lord
To say that goodness should result
In such a slim reward,
When goodness is so difficult.(21)
Goodness was difficult indeed for Scott and Zelda. The Jazz Age had crashed for both of them: alcoholism and schizophrenia disrupted their golden lives. In the year that Thomas was discovering Conklin and Loeb at Princeton, Fitzgerald had learned the darker lessons of mental disease from Freud and Jung. Yet, from the tortured years with poor Zelda, Fitzgerald forged his masterpiece, Tender Is the Night. Its hero is not a Jazz Age rounder nor a romantic philosopher, but the physician/scientist Dick Diver.
There is a footnote to Lew Thomas’s conversion of Amory Blaine to Dick Diver. In the early 1970s, Thomas spent his summers at Woods Hole, where he studied the effects of endotoxin on amoebocytes of the horseshoe crab (Limulus). The house Thomas bought at Woods Hole was only a few blocks removed from the old Conklin house on High Street, and the building in which he punctured crabs was the Loeb building. He had also come to the seashore to collect his thoughts and his essays. His masterpiece, The Lives of a Cell, written in good part at Woods Hole, appeared in 1974. The rest is part of the history of arts and science.