Arrowsmith

A friend told me that, based on my interests in science and scientists in literature, I had to read this book for my Ph.D. exams. Now, a 1925 American novel was more than a little bit outside my scope of British literature of the nineteenth century, but no one on my committee objected, and I put it on the list. (She also told me it takes place in a fictionalized version of my home city, Cincinnati, but Lewis's fictional state of Winnemac is partially carved out of northwest Ohio, which makes Toledo seem more likely.)

Well, I will tell you that I am glad I did, because the things that interest me about science and literature are all over Arrowsmith, with the added wrinkle of the differences wrought by the increased professionalization of show more science that happened between the 1890s and the 1920s. Martin Arrowsmith is torn between pure scientific aspiration and the commercial and financial necessities of everyday life in early twentieth century America. Martin sees being in the laboratory of his mentor Gottlieb as a form of prayer (27); Gottlieb is said to obey "mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of his science" (123); Gottlieb says that a scientific calling is "a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry" (266); and Martin has the "one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity" (279). But these scientific values come into conflict with those of his peers, his superiors, his employers, his wife, basically everybody. I actually found Martin's continuing attempts to integrate his personal values with society's values quite moving by the end of the novel, because it's a struggle we all go through in our own way.

His problem is not that he wants one thing and society wants another, but that actually he wants two contradictory things. At one point Martin is on track for an incredible discovery, and he dreams of the personal benefit this will bring him:

He had visions of his name in journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheering him. He had been an unknown among the experts of the Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But when he was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before him, supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work opened, and in him was new power. (299)

Right in that short passage, you see him go from material aspirations to scientific ones. He wants the material benefits of successful inquiry, but he also just want to do the work, to feel like he's accessing prayer or something mystical like his mentor Gottlieb. The two desires are linked, of course, but not the same, and do not always align, and that is the tragedy of Martin Arrowsmith. I myself am not a scientist, of course, but the professionalization of curiosity may yet be my tragedy, and the tragedy of all of us. show less

When I was assigned to teach the Modern Novel, I almost instantly knew that not only did I want to teach Arrowsmith, but that I wanted to teach it first, even if some of the other novels I was teaching preceded it in publication. I'll explain why, but perhaps the long way round. (Arrowsmith does everything the long way round.)

It's often helpful when reading works of fiction to find those metafictional moments where they talk about other works of fiction, because what the fiction says about other fictions should tell you something about what it thinks fiction should be doing, and thus what itself is doing. If a character in a sci-fi story says all those sci-fi stories you've read are unrealistic in that they depict ventilation ducts show more people can crawl through, you'll know this sci-fi story is depicting itself as more realistic. Arrowsmith does this with a comment about novels about truth-seekers:

[M]ost people who call themselves “truth-seekers” […] did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen burners or reagents; or they went, at great expense and with much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one’s navel. (271)

So from this I think we can see that Arrowsmith is a novel about people questing after truth, but one that positions itself as taking place in the "real world," not some abstruse fantasy. Martin Arrowsmith is a man seeking truth, but he does so in a world that is provided with Bunsen burners and reagents. I don't know enough about science to know if Lewis actually gets the practicalities right, but it definitely comes across as realistic-- or, perhaps, realist.

George Levine's monograph Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England has been a strong influence on how I understand the realist novel; he examines a range of novels, biographies, and memoirs about how people interact with the world scientifically, but in the middle of it all, he has this great statement about realism:

[T]he practice of realism itself, and critical demands for truthfulness, suggest how central to the Victorian novel was the enterprise of knowledge seeking and truth telling, how often plots turn on the power of protagonists to develop the proper temper and state of mind to allow realistic confrontation with the “object”—what one might see as acquisition the proper “method.” One can only achieve truth through objectivity; one can only be objective by virtue of the moral strength of self-restraint. (149)

This rings true for me-- so many Elizabeth Gaskell novels, for example, are about their protagonists learning to see or communicate what actually happened; this could describe Mary Barton, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. You could argue similar things about George Eliot, I expect. But Levine's idea doesn't only fit the Victorian realist novel; even if modernism was taking off in 1924 (A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man was eight years old; Mrs. Dalloway was one year away), over in America, Sinclair Lewis was still practicing realism.

Arrowsmith really resonates with Levine's statement above. It is a novel about a man trying to find the proper "method": does he have a good way of seeking knowledge and telling truth? The novel might contain a number of experiments, but the novel itself is an experiment in seeing if a particular method works, or if it fails, or what alternatives might exists, or what modifications might need to be made.

This really comes through in one of Martin's conversations with his mentor, Gottlieb. In class, I made my students work through a whole long speech of Gottlieb's where he lays out not just what a scientist should do, but how they should be. I'll be kinder to you lot and just give you a single excerpt:

He [the scientist] must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yes dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors—and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody! (279)

As you can see, Gottlieb's conception of science extends beyond the laboratory. If science is a way of thinking and being in the world, you can't just turn it off. Your heartlessness will extend into society itself. Gottlieb sees this as a positive-- the scientist will do a better job than all the other people who claim authority over society.

Earlier, I said the novel itself was an experiment, and this accords with something Levine says about the texts he's working with, where the "method" being tested is the scientific, objective one (much like in Arrowsmith):

All these novels implicitly question, more or less critically, the ideal of self-denial in pursuit of objectivity, as that ideal impinges on the lives of real people living in the material world.
Each of them is sensitive to the difficulties of truth—its disguises and elusiveness and dangers. […] The novels frequently build their plots around the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth, except that, as novels, they can never dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant. (150-51)

Arrowsmith is very much a novel about "real people living in the material world" (that it is too material a world is clearly Lewis's concern) and the body is not trivial or irrelevant-- the body is actually at the heart of what is my favorite part of Arrowsmith, Martin's in-the-field testing of both science and his scientific ideals. Gottlieb says the scientist must be heartless to guide society, and Martin tries to put that heartlessness into action when he goes to St. Hubert to try to rid it of the plague with his new medical discovery.

This novel is always good, but this is the part where I think it gets really good. As Martin tries to stick to his ideals in the face of the realities of the world, the book gets genuinely moving and tragic. Gottlieb might want Martin to dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant, might want him to be heartless and so do more for society than all those with "heart," but in the end Martin's ideals collapse and he has to come to grips with the awful tragedy of how the world works.

It's a great example of the realist novel at its best, and that made it a great book to lead my class off with. The whole twentieth-century trajectory of the novel is arguably about rebelling against the kinds of things Arrowsmith does here, but I love it anyway.

added November 2024:
I'm currently teaching a general education course focused on the medical humanities. Originally my thought was to play to my strengths by doing short science fiction about medicine. But as things were getting down to the wire, I wasn't sure if I would have enough short stories to teach without having to do a lot of research to prep the class... research I honestly didn't have time to do. But then I cast my mind back and remembered Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, a novel I taught a decade ago! A whole 450-page novel about a doctor trying to find his way in the world! What could be better for using up a month of course time? But also giving us a lot of very relevant things to discuss.

So I put in my book order, and when the semester rolled around, I taught the book. Above, you can get a sense of the kind of things I was interested in last time around, and I did do some of that this time, too: Arrowsmith as bildungsroman, Arrowsmith as exemplar for the realist project.

But the big change in the world since the last time I taught Arrowsmith (other than the fact that college students can't cope with a 450-page book anymore, even across three weeks) is, of course, that we have all lived through a major public health crisis... and Arrowsmith is all about public health. Martin Arrowsmith spends a lot of time working in a public health department, trying to convince people to behave rationally in the face of scientific evidence... a struggle we have all now witnessed firsthand.

I remember making jokes to my class in 2014 about the inanity of the songs Martin's boss at the public health department comes up with to communicate public health messages. At the time, these seemed like goofy 1920s nonsense. But in the 2020s, we did all this! Martin's struggle to get people to put aside their petty prejudices in favor of collective action is something we all saw in real time. I realize now, of course, that Lewis must have been thinking (at least in part) of the Spanish flu, and a student pointed out to me that he was probably also inspired by "Typhoid Mary."

So there was a lot of fruitful material for discussion here. I paired a lot of our course texts with episodes of Radiolab as a way of letting my class get to interesting issues in detail without forcing me to assign a bunch of other reading; I paired Arrowsmith with three. I don't know that my students loved Arrowsmith, but I think it teaches very well in that it's got a lot of great medical issues in it that are very teachable. I don't know that I would teach the book every time I teach this class (I am toying with an alternative), but I definitely will reteach it when I teach the class again next semester at least. show less

This brilliant work, published in 1920s America and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, addresses the state of medical research shortly after the Flexner Report famously shone a path for medical research to progress. It sets forth the classical view of a medical researcher – isolated, dedicated to his research, not interested in people, and essentially living in his lab. And yes, that view is traditionally centered around a researcher being a male in a more-or-less patriarchal role. Lewis sets forth this vision, modeled it after the Rockefeller Institute (now, Rockefeller University) in New York City.

This fictional story tells about the career of Martin Arrowsmith, MD. It shares about his two marriages, his career in seeing patients, his show more discovering a cure for the bubonic plague and saving of an island-full of lives on an island in the West Indies, his regrets, and finally his utmost dedication to the ideals of science. This was the way of the new medical doctor. Before the Flexner Report, American medical practice was much more of an art-form than a science. The revolution which Lewis’ Arrowsmith represents sought to ground medical practice in reality-based science. Around the time of its writing, institutes of medical research like Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller were on the rise in the United States, and people were dedicating their lives to science in a seemingly selfless manner.

Of course, Arrowsmith eventually proves to be more of an addict to science in the end. His story is one about the excesses of science and the very real human costs of such a lifestyle. Approximately one hundred years later, a generation of women scientists have questioned whether such devotion and imbalance is necessary. These courageous women point to the value of a family life and to having some sort of life outside of scientific work.

Perhaps another Arrowsmith needs to be written for our century. Medical research is not the up-and-coming thing anymore (though it is still a fruitful and lucrative endeavor); computer technology is the field more on the ascent. In Lewis’ era, medicine was more of a quasi-priesthood, and medical research was something done well primarily in Germany. Today, medicine and medical research are essentially one of many professions of the educated establishment. In contemporary research, there still exists a radical fanaticism of extreme devotion towards a single goal, but alongside, there exist other ways of approaching a vocation. Perhaps a new writer needs to tell the tale of groundbreaking work done in a healthy, responsible, and mature manner…

If that ever comes about, that new writer’s path will go squarely through Lewis’ paradigm-setting work of Arrowsmith. He set the path for generations to come with this tale. Lewis’ words artfully bring the characters to life; his research is impeccable; and his plot is plausible and moving. His character types fit today’s culture even if they need to be updated for alternate modern forms. This book is worth the time to read for those interested in the fields of healthcare and research. show less

This books is one of the classic and most generative focal points for the mythos of the modern scientist, and it is thus not surprising that it is steeped in a romantic view of science. Indeed, the ethos of true science is pretty much the only thing that is spared Lewis’s vitriolic lampooning.(One of the problems with the book is that Lewis’s satire of small-minded country bumpkins, the small-town "booboisie," and the callow pretensions of urban sophisticates is that it is all too easy. He’s spot on for what’s laughably and disturbingly empty about these types, but mostly misses the possibility that there is much redeeming about them.)

But his portrayal of the true scientist’s calling is suffused with a suffocating masculine show more romanticism that I found nauseating. By the end of the book, we learn that not only does the true scientists need to eschew the lure of money and fame, cling to a steely detachment from normal human feeling, avoid distracting entanglements with women if possible or shamelessly ignore and exploit your wife’s devotion if you must marry, but you need to do all this while embracing the rigors of a manly passion for roughing it. At novel's end, our hero is pursuing his cutting edge science in a rough-hewn log cabin laboratory in the Vermont woods. (I wish I were kidding.)

So for all of its brutally comic (and sometimes brilliant and hilarious) satire, the book boils down to a syrupy masculinity that’s pretty hard to swallow. Or to keep down. Read it if you must -- for historically interest in the 20th century glorification of the scientist. But keep a bag handy. show less

3.5 stars, rounded down.

To truly appreciate Arrowsmith, you must appreciate satire, because much of this book is written a bit tongue in cheek. Martin Arrowsmith is a man who aspires to be a pure scientist, and struggles to do so in the face of commercialism, hubris and ambition. I must confess to not liking Martin universally. He is pompous at times, and he is cold and unfeeling at others. I wanted him to find a better balance between his dedication to his work and his personal relationships, particularly the one he shared with his wife, Leora.

I was struck with how little has changed in our society over the century that lies between the publication of this novel and our own day. Martin Arrowsmith is a physician, but one who cares show more little for the practice of medicine and is much more involved with the research of disease. With our current struggle with how to best provide health care for the masses, I could see so many of the questions were the same in 1920. Do you rush to market with an inoculation that has not been completely proved or do you continue your research until you are satisfied there can be no error, risking the deaths of infected people and the chance that someone else will beat you to the market with their own serum? What is the purpose of the independent research laboratory--the production of discovery useful to the population or the making of profits for the shareholders? What about the charming but ignorant, or worse, morally corrupt, men who are running things, making the decisions, choosing the direction?

While I found this to be well-written and its message meaningful, there was a missing element for me, and that was emotional involvement. I found that the further into the story I got the more emotionally divorced I felt. I could not muster a tear when the events in the story might have merited one, nor could I feel the injustice or frustration, although I recognized it and chronicled it. I was very much looking forward to reading this, and I felt a bit deflated when I closed the last page.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not suggesting it isn’t worth the reading, it just didn’t live up to my expectations. show less

Arrowsmith is primarily a novel of social commentary on the state of and prospects for medicine in the United States in the 1920s. The protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, is something of a rebel, and often challenges the existing state of things when he finds it wanting.
However he engages in much agonizing along the way concerning his career and life decisions. While detailing Martin's pursuit of the noble ideals of medical research for the benefit of mankind and of selfless devotion to the care of patients, Lewis throws many less noble temptations and self-deceptions in Martin's path. The attractions of financial security, recognition, even wealth and power distract Arrowsmith from his original plan to follow in the footsteps of his first show more mentor, Max Gottlieb, a brilliant but abrasive bacteriologist. His derailment from his ideals, while differing in the details, reminds me a bit of Lydgate in Middlemarch.
In the course of the novel Lewis describes many aspects of medical training, medical practice, scientific research, scientific fraud, medical ethics, public health, and of both personal and professional conflicts that are still relevant today. Professional jealousy, institutional pressures, greed, stupidity, and negligence are all satirically depicted, and Martin himself is exasperatingly self-involved. But there is also tireless dedication, and respect for the scientific method and intellectual honesty. The result is an engaging novel that deserved the Pulitzer which the author rejected. show less

Reason read: Pulitzer Prize winner (declined by author). This book is a very good portrayal of what is wrong with medical research. In many ways this book also reminded me of man made epidemics of recent time. There really is no good research for all the reasons that book demonstrated and the politics of it all.