Thomas Fite Paine, Jr. graduated from Vanderbilt School of Medicine in 1942. After graduation, Dr. Paine's career stretched from Harvard Medical School to Cambridge, England, the University of Michigan, and the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham. In 1961, he was appointed professor of medicine at Vanderbilt and remained there until his retirement in 1987. Throughout most of his two decades at Vanderbilt, Paine was chief of the medical service at General Hospital.

From the 1950s to 1971, Dr. Paine was a consultant to the National Institutes of Health. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 scientific papers, his principal work being a series on the side effects of antibiotics, a field in which his name is well-known.