Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him to look more interested.

“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I have often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for public health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and punch of Kipling.

“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader⁠—say a Billy Sunday of the movement⁠—a man who would know how to use sensationalism properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian preachers⁠—sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational. Huh! If they only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be sensational enough! Still, I try, I try, and⁠—Look here. Here’s a placard, it was painted by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around everywhere:

“You can’t get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,
So let’s every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.

“Then there’s another⁠—this is a minor thing; it doesn’t try to drive home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise you the effect it’s had on careless housewives, who of course don’t mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep put into them, and when they see a card like this, it makes ’em think:

“Boil the milk bottles or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.

“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some day when you get time, glance over this volume of clippings⁠—just to show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed in Des Moines⁠—say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet when I proved by statistics that ninety-three percent of all insanity is caused by booze! Then this⁠—well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly, but it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in touch with all the movements for civic weal.”

He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was the headline:

Doc Pickerbaugh banner booster
of Evangeline County leads big
go-to-church demonstration here

Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen percent! Oh, Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well, this might interest you then. It’s from the Zenith Advocate-Times, and it’s by Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most popular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I was in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregational Sunday-Schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The Morality of A1 Health.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:

“Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin’ poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.
He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son⁠—of⁠—a⁠—gun!”

For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu‑ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brainchildren may teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.

“Still you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting⁠—I know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled “Pickerbaugh Pickings.”

In verse and aphorism, “Pickings” recommended good health, good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three percent of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.

Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched “Pickings” from him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time. But this second