Thomas Anwyl-Davies trained at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. He qualified in 1917. His MD (London) thesis on syphilis won the gold medal for 1930, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1937.

During the First World War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted as resident medical officer to the Royal Fusiliers, then fighting on the Somme. He returned to St Thomas’s Hospital with the intention of taking up ENT surgery but was pressed by his seniors into the VD department. He therefore became one of the first doctors of distinction to take up the new specialty of venereology. He was director of the Lydia Department of sexual health 1937–1961.