Dr. T. L. Perry Sr.; Lost Practice During 1950s

Thomas L. Perry Sr., a physician who became a pacifist when he marched into Buchenwald with Allied troops at the end of World War II and later was forced out of his pediatrics practice in Los Angeles because of his politics, has died at 74 in Vancouver.

The Vancouver Sun reported that he died June 7 of cancer. Perry had been doing research and teaching at the University of British Columbia. He moved to Canada in 1962 after doing research with Linus Pauling at Caltech into the mysteries of schizophrenia.

Born in Asheville, N.C., he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford from 1937 to 1939 and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1942. He left a pediatrics practice in New York City to join the Army Medical Corps and saw the horrors of Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps in the waning days of the war.

The Sun quoted his son, Thomas Jr., as saying that the carnage he saw there made his father a lifelong pacifist and opponent of nuclear weapons.

It was that posture that led to his difficulties with the state Senate’s Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s.

Subpoenaed by the committee in 1954, Perry refused to answer questions about his political beliefs and his membership in the Assn. of Interns and Medical Students, which committee members said was a group whose “whole tone follows the Communist Party line.”

Perry likened state Sen. Hugh Burns’ committee to one led by U. S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and said, “I can’t be a party in destroying political freedom in America. . . .”

Two years earlier, he had similarly opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee and was fired from the staff of Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles and from his teaching position at USC.

He also had refused to answer the congressional committee’s inquiries into his membership in the Communist Party.

In 1958, Pauling brought Perry to Caltech where they studied the causes of schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, in-born errors of metabolism and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In Canada, Perry worked as a pediatrician and as a professor in the department of pharmacology and therapeutics at the Vancouver school.

In addition to his son, Perry is survived by his wife, Claire, another son, John, daughters Susan and Kitty and six grandchildren.