Outstanding Physician

In 1951 Percy Julian, a well-known chemist, visited the offices of Theodore K. Lawless, a dermatologist who practiced on the South Side of Chicago. Approaching Lawless's clinic, he came upon a crowd. "I [had] never before seen such a sight," he later recalled. "A line of [people] about two hundred feet long extended from the door of his waiting rooms, which were full, to the street — sufferers to be treated." Lawless was, recalled his colleague Harold Thatcher, "a doctor in the old sense of the word. He dealt in humanity."

Theodore Kenneth Lawless was born on December 6, 1892, on a farm near Thibodaux, a city on a Bayou Lafourche, in southeast Louisiana. His father, Alfred Lawless, was a minister (perhaps part-time), and his mother was Harriet Dunn Lawless. His grandparents had been slaves. While a child, work assisting a veterinarian led to his interest in medicine. Theodore attended Straight College in New Orleans, then one of the only secondary schools in the Deep South available to blacks. An excellent student and obvious candidate for university training, he attended Talladega College in Alabama, a black university founded during Reconstruction. T. K. Lawless received his bachelor's degree in 1914.

Lawless's education, begun in such humble circumstances and constricted by racism, blossomed into training exemplary by any standard. He began medical school at the University of Kansas, from 1914 to 1916, and continued at Northwestern University, from which he received a medical degree in 1919 and an M.S. degree in 1920. By now he had decided to specialize in dermatology and a related discipline, syphilology. He continued post-graduate work at Columbia University, attended Harvard Medical School in 1921, and worked at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed his education in Europe in classical fashion at a time when medical schools in the United States were still being modernized and reorganized. In 1921 Lawless studied in Paris at the Hôpital St. Louis, which possessed, then as today, one of the finest dermatology clinics in the world. Lawless also undertook research at the University of Freiburg and the University of Vienna. He returned to the United States in 1924.

In the first stage of his career, Lawless both practiced privately and taught at Northwestern University, where, about 1924, he set up the school's first clinical laboratory in dermatology. He apparently met with considerable racial prejudice. At the university, as well as at Cook County Hospital, where he also taught, "he was merely tolerated and not embraced," wrote W. Montague Cobb in a memoir some years ago. From 1928 to 1936 he was the Elizabeth Ward Research Fellow at Northwestern. But in 1941, Lawless resigned from the school. An incident, apparently inspired by racism, led to his being assigned no students.

Over the course of fifteen years, Lawless published a small body of research, by which he achieved a significant reputation. From work begun at the University of Freiburg, he published a paper on sporotrichosis, a fungal disease that people contract from plants. It is an unpleasant, chronic condition, and Lawless developed a diagnostic tool for it. Lawless also did research in syphilis, which, before antibiotics, was a lifelong illness. Although Lawless's studies on electrically-induced fever as a therapy for syphilis yielded little, his research into treatments for skin damaged by the arsenical drugs then in use was valuable.

Once out of academia, Lawless moved into private practice full-time. At one point he attempted to open an office in downtown Chicago, but could not rent space. He founded instead a practice on Chicago’s South Side, the city’s oldest black neighborhood, which eventually occupied an imposing, somewhat dilapidated mansion on South Parkway (now King Drive). It was an unlikely location for one of the most successful dermatology clinics in the United States.

Lawless was at work by seven in the morning, and the clinic opened at eight. Early each morning, patients — many black, most white — would gather on the sidewalk outside his mansion. They were served on a first come basis. A long line would develop as every seat was taken in the capacious waiting rooms. Patients sat and stood amidst a plethora of Chinese antiquities until called. They commonly waited three and four hours to be seen by Lawless or one of his associates.

Lawless charged as little as five dollars per visit during the 1950s. During the Second World War and the Korean War, he treated men in the armed services for free. However, fees had nothing to do with his clinic's success. Lawless was sought after because dermatology, as a specialty, particularly benefits from rare clinical and diagnostic acumen. In addition, Lawless had developed, at least to some extent, his own pharmacopeia. Over the years Lawless acquired considerable wealth. Beginning in the 1940s, with the end of the Great Depression he invested money from his practice in a variety of ventures. He became a community leader whose profile lent prestige and confidence to investors. Lawless served as president of a federal savings and loan corporation which aimed at establishing black-owned businesses. He was also chief of another corporation which financed low-cost housing. These and other enterprises were successful. By the 1960s Lawless was one of about thirty-five black millionaires in the United States.

As Lawless began to amass wealth, he became a philanthropist. As a child, Lawless recalled, his family had been helped by a Jewish peddler; as a medical student, he had negotiated a racist education system with the help of Jewish physicians who knew the ropes. Lawless returned these significant but minor favors with considerable largesse, saying, “I’m simply trying to repay a debt of gratitude.” He donated money toward a dermatology division at Bellinson Hospital in Israel, and helped develop the Science Summer Camp for gifted children at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In the United States he provided scholarships for black students. And he helped African students attend American medical schools.

Authoritative, at times imperious in manner, with a cultivated language at once direct and courtly, Lawless was frequently honored for his good works. His personal life, unless some memoir appears, remains a closed book. He never married and at the end of his life, his only close relative was his sister. Shortly before his death, aware he was suffering from cancer and would soon die, he celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday. At a dinner in his honor, he offered his belief that sensual pleasure did not offer the greatest happiness in life. “True happiness,” he declared, “requires cultivated tastes and discrimination. True happiness is necessary for the mental health and physical well-being of the individual. Within the framework of happiness there come into being family relations and a friendly attitude toward others, leading to a bond of understanding.”

T. K. Lawless died on May 1, 1971.