A Wise Doctor's Essays and "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony"
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Hippocrates wrote "Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity." Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) lived, learned, loved, and taught medicine at Princeton, Harvard, New York, and Yale Universities and as President of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He thought deeply and wrote elegantly about science, nature, and humanity. His collected essays have won National Book Awards in two categories. Since he published his last collection in 1983, science has solved some problems, many remain, and new problems have emerged, but Lewis' concerns about how we use or fail to use science to benefit humanity remain timely and even prescient. We will read and discuss the essays in Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. They include: The Attic of the Brain, The Artificial Heart, The Problem of Dementia, The Lie Detector, and On Medicine and the Bomb.