dumbfoundry

His long service to Twin Cities medicine started with his return from war, and included serving on the staff of what is now the Hennepin County Medical Center, plus what is now Abbott Northwestern Hospital, where he was chief of staff during its merger in 1970. He also taught as a clinical professor at the university and was in a private-practice group in downtown Minneapolis. [...]

"He was a genuine polymath," McCannel said. "The big guns in the English Department used to love to go talk with him."

In the late 1950s, Thomes' university friends included the novelist Saul Bellow and the poet John Berryman, both English teachers.

Berryman, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for "Dream Songs," was a special charge for Thomes and Dr. Seamus McKenna, who joined Thomes for a time in the medical practice.

Berryman, who killed himself in 1972, was a heavy drinker for years before getting sober. In the early 1960s, during one of his hospital stays arranged by Thomes, the doctor gave an order to housekeeping that no one was to clean the poet's room until Thomes or McKenna had picked up all of the scraps of paper that Berryman had flung about, McKenna said. Seventy percent of "Dream Songs" was written on those scraps, he said. [...]

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