Thomas Dwight was born on October 13, 1843, in Boston, Massachusetts.

[4] Dwight joined the Catholic Church in 1856, and graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1867.

He succeeded Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as Parkman professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School in 1883.

In the Warren Museum of Anatomy at Harvard, Dwight arranged a section of osteology, considered one of the best in existence, and he had an international reputation as an anatomist.

[5] Among his writings are: "Frozen Sections of a Child" (1872); "Clinical Atlas of Variations of the Bones of the Hands and Feet" (1907); "Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist" (1911),[6] a valuable work of Christian apologetics.