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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“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see him swim that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.
But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers had but fumbled and hinted.
In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have to live up to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky. Amid the bustle of operations he began to picture the rapt quietude of the laboratory. “I better cut this out,” he said to Leora, “if I’m going to settle down in Wheatsylvania and tend to business and make a living—and I by golly am!”
Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. He passed through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office where she was a stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner. Martin introduced them, and the little man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked, “Will you children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man.”
He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he were not student and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was one pedagogue who could still be interested in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He led the two starvelings to a chophouse and in a settle-walled booth he craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.
He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:
“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like these laboratory men.”
“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.
“No‑o. But with him—It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods are the cynics, the destroyers—‘crapehangers’ the vulgar call ’em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own. But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s gods and turned them to the use of human beings—made them come alive!
“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue—yes and justify himself for torturing people just to see how they screamed—and then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!
“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion.”
After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and sat between them, patting Martin’s shoulder, patting Leora’s arm, choking with delight when the comedian stepped into the pail of whitewash. In midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their affection for him, and saw their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.
But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.
Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.
“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why have you never come back to me?”
The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.
Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always talking about?”
“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”
“I don’t—Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a great man! I wish—I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so—oh, he’s like a sword—no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”
“God! So would I!”
But in the bustle of
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