The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

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Penguin Publishing Group, 1995 - Medical - 160 pages
A Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of man and his world begun in The Lives of a Cell. Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

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Contents

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1
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7
III
12
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Lewis Thomas was born in Flushing, New York, and received his medical degree from Harvard University, with a specialization in internal medicine and pathology. He has been a professor at several medical schools, as well as dean of the Yale Medical School. Most recently Thomas has been chancellor and president emeritus of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and professor of medicine at the Cornell Medical School. His erudite books have earned him a wide audience, making him one of the best-known advocates of science in the United States during the past 20 years. For example, The Lives of a Cell won the National Book Award in arts and letters in 1974, and The Medusa and the Snail won the American Book Award for science in 1981.

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