London - The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas did not drink himself to death as legend has it, but was the victim of a doctor's error, according to a book published this week. Officially the cause of his death in a New York hospital in 1953 at the age of 39 was "acute alcoholic poisoning" after a bout in which Thomas was said to have drunk 18 straight Bourbon whiskeys. But the book, The Death of Dylan Thomas by George Tremlett and James Nashold, will claim Thomas was never as big a drinker as he was reputed to be and the real cause of his death was that Dr Milton Feltenstein mistook a diabetic coma for a drunken stupor and wrongly prescribed injections including cortisone, morphine and benzedrine.