Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕
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Martin Arrowsmith, the titular protagonist, grows up in a small Midwestern town where he wants to become a doctor. At medical school he meets an abrasive but brilliant professor, Gottlieb, who becomes his mentor. As Arrowsmith completes his training he begins a career practicing medicine. But, echoing Lewis’s Main Street, small-town life becomes too insular and restricting; his interest in research and not people makes him unpopular, and he decides to work in a research laboratory instead.
From there Arrowsmith begins a career that hits all of the ethical quandaries that scientists and those in the medical profession encounter: everything from the ethical problem of research protocol strictness versus saving lives, to doing research for the betterment of mankind versus for turning a profit, to the politics of institutions, to the social problems of wealth and poverty. Arrowsmith struggles with these dilemmas because, like all of us, he isn’t perfect. Despite his interest in helping humanity, he has little interest in people—aside from his serial womanizing—and this makes the path of his career an even harder one to walk. He’s surrounded on all sides by icons of nobility, icons of pride, and icons of rapaciousness, each one distracting him from his calling.
Though the book isn’t strictly a satire, few escape Lewis’s biting pen. He skewers everyone indiscriminately: small-town rubes, big-city blowhards, aspiring politicians, doctors of both the noble and greedy variety, hapless ivory-towered researchers, holier-than-thou neighbors, tedious gilded-age socialites, and even lazy and backwards islanders. In some ways, Arrowsmith rivals Main Street in its often-bleak view of human nature—though unlike Main Street, the good to humanity that science offers is an ultimate light at the end of the tunnel.
The novel’s publication in 1925 made it one of the first serious “science” novels, exploring all aspects of the life and career of a modern scientist. Lewis was aided in the novel’s preparation by Paul de Kruif, a microbiologist and writer, whose medically-accurate contributions greatly enhance the text’s realist flavor.
In 1926 Arrowsmith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis famously declined it. In his refusal letter, he claimed a disinterest in prizes of any kind; but the New York Times reported that those close to him say he was still angered over the Pulitzer’s last-minute snatching of the 1921 prize from Main Street in favor of giving it to The Age of Innocence.
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- Author: Sinclair Lewis
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She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.
“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that tomorrow.”
“Do that t’morrow—do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.
Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.
In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become of him.
Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It seemed filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.
Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at dusting—here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease—a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a regiment.
Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.
All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing for someone to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.
“Got to—got to—can’t remember what it was,” her voice kept appealing to her cloudy brain.
Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in flight, and in the darkness staggered out to find help. As she came to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge, unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees she crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for Martin.
She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for him—listened—tense with listening.
“You will come! I know you’ll come and help me! I know. You’ll come! Martin! Sandy! Sandy!” she sobbed.
Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her hoarse and struggling breath.
VLike Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage to everybody.
“I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they tried to lynch me,” he boasted.
He had explained Leora to Joyce.
“I don’t know whether you two will like each other. You’re so darn different. You’re awfully articulate, and you like these ‘pretty people’ that you’re always talking about, but she doesn’t care a hang for ’em. She sits back—oh, she never misses anything, but she never says much. Still, she’s got the best instinct for honesty that I’ve ever known. I hope you two’ll get each other. I was afraid to let her come here—didn’t know what I’d find—but now I’m going to hustle to Penrith and bring her here today.”
He borrowed Twyford’s car and drove to Blackwater, up to Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have a lively time in the evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they would sing—
He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, “Lee! Leora! Come on! Here we are!”
The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty, and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a desperate silence. He was uneasy. He darted in, found no one in the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bedroom.
On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting, was Leora’s body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook her, he stood weeping.
He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her understand that he had loved her and had left her here only for her safety—
There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down raw full glasses. They did not affect him.
By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy garden looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her light stiff body, kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row of her little dresses with the lines of her soft body in them, he was terrified.
Then he went to pieces.
He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford’s, and moved into a room behind the Surgeon General’s office. Beside his cot there was always a bottle.
Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he raged, “Oh, damn experimentation!” and, despite Stokes’s dismay, he gave the phage to everyone who asked.
Only in St. Swithin’s, since there his experiment was so excellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from distributing the phage universally; but the conduct of this experiment he turned over
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