Lewis Thomas' Macabre Poem "ALLEN STREET"

The point of this blog is to give you entry to Lewis Thomas's grim/funny poem about the autopsy service, written when he was in Harvard Med School in the 1930s.   First some background.

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When I was in my college and early med school years, physician-scientist Lewis Thomas was publishing a series of books of essays on medicine and the biological sciences.

Thomas (1913-1993) was a 1937 graduate of Harvard Medical School  who rose to be Dean of both NYU and Yale medical schools and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.  (See his Wiki here).  His books included Lives of a Cell (1974), Medusa and the Snail (1979), and The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (autobiographical; 1983).

Youngest Science notes on page 5 that in 1935, he got on the HMS yearbook staff because he'd written a poem about the autopsy service at MGH, called "Allen Street."  Although it's not footnoted in the text, the full poem can be found in the Appendix (pp. 249-253).

Hoping it's within the limits of critical quotation, I've put a PDF of the full poem in the cloud here.

Sample: Allen Street, Canto III

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The poem is mentioned and quoted on Page 24 of the book on the history of the MGH pathology department; PDF online here.

Many of Thomas's books are available on Amazon Kindle.

Page 5 of Lewis's book (can be seen in my short cloud PDF cited just above the poem) mentions classmate Albert Coons, who became a noted pathologist.  

Lewis Thomas, the medical scientist, not to be confused with Lowell Thomas, the 20th-century journalist.