Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis
Summary
Martin Arrowsmith is a doctor's apprentice from a small Winnemac town who catches, at medical school, the one incurable infection in the book: the scientific ideal, embodied in Max Gottlieb, a German Jewish bacteriologist who regards most of American medicine as commerce wearing a stethoscope. The novel then marches Martin through every institution that will try to buy the ideal off him: country practice in a town that wants a booster, public health work under a publicity hound, a fashionable clinic, and finally the McGurk Institute in New York, pure research wrapped in fundraising galas.
At each stage he is saved, barely, by two people: Gottlieb, and his wife Leora, the most likeable woman in Lewis, who follows him everywhere, deflates him regularly and asks nothing. When Martin discovers the phage, a principle that kills bacteria, the institute scents glory and ships him to a Caribbean island in bubonic plague to run the experiment properly, half the population treated, half controlled. There the book turns serious: Leora dies of the plague while he works, and Martin, gutted, gives the phage to everyone and destroys the science. New York calls him a hero. He knows precisely what he is, and the last movement, walking away from the institute, a rich second wife and his own celebrity to do pure research in a Vermont shack, is either integrity or flight.
Around four hundred and fifty pages, satirical and driving.
Best for readers who want the original novel of scientific idealism against institutional money, still standard on medical school reading lists a century later.
Historical Context & Significance
Arrowsmith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1926, and Sinclair Lewis refused it, the only fiction winner ever to do so. His stated grounds were that all prizes, like all titles, are dangerous, and that the Pulitzer's charge to reward wholesome American atmosphere corrupted what prizes should measure; underneath lay his unhealed grievance that Main Street had been passed over in 1921 for The Age of Innocence. The prize stands recorded, declined. He accepted the Nobel in 1930 cheerfully enough, the first American to win it.
The book's science had a real engineer: Paul de Kruif, the bacteriologist turned writer who took a quarter of the royalties for supplying the laboratory culture Lewis could not have invented, and who modelled Gottlieb on his own teachers Novy and Loeb.
John Ford filmed it in 1931 with Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, and the novel has never left print: it remains the book young scientists are handed, and the phrase for what it describes, the religion of the laboratory against the market, still comes from here.