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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On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’ agency.
The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his temper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my record? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’t when I first wrote you, but—You seem to have a good record as a laboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of the slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you nor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has decided to found a university that for plant and endowment and individuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off in education—biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology—I guess you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’re not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, they fired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had your lesson—Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly, without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.
XIII INo one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company was an old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable doctors—or practically only with reputable doctors. It furnished excellent antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of official preparations, with the plainest and most official-looking labels on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had asserted that they produced doubtful vaccines, yet he returned from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he was no longer interested in teaching, and he would be willing to work for them on half time if he might use their laboratories, on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.
When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was certainly not altogether sane. “Education! Biggest gymnasium in the world! Incapable of responsibility. Teaching I can do no more. But Hunziker will laugh at me. I haf told the truth about him and I shall haf to—Dear Gott, what shall I do?”
Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at him from doorways, hope glided.
The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irascible burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, “Yes, yes, vot iss it?”
A twanging nonchalant voice: “This M. C. Gottlieb?”
“This is Dr. Gottlieb!”
“Well, I guess you’re the party. Hola wire. Long distance wants yuh.”
Then, “Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speaking. From Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you join our staff.”
“I—But—”
“I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses—oh, we read the newspaper clippings very efficiently!—but we feel that when you come to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm better, you’ll be enthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I’m not interrupting something.”
Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottlieb sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated with a forlorn effort at dignity:
“No, it iss all right.”
“Well—we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year, for a starter, and we shan’t worry about the halftime arrangement. We’ll give you all the space and technicians and material you need, and you just go ahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems important to you. Our only request is that if you do find any serums which are of real value to the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and if we lose money on ’em, it doesn’t matter. We like to make money, if we can do it honestly, but our chief purpose is to serve mankind. Of course if the serums pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generous commission. Now about practical details—”
IIGottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a religious-seeming custom.
Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, no consciousness of a Supreme Being—other than Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he meditated, “I was asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists! This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much more aut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Fine dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles! Du Heiliger!”
But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.
In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type, announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.
In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem to grin.”
In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, “How could old Max
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