Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

First published: 1925

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: Elk Mills, Winnemac; West Indies

Principal characters

• Martin Arrowsmith, a medical-research scientist
• Leora Arrowsmith, his wife, a nurse
• Max Gottlieb, an immunologist
• Gustaf Sondelius, a research scientist
• Terry Wickett, Martin’s friend
• Almus Pickerbaugh, a public-health reformer

The Story

Martin Arrowsmith is the descendant of pioneers who lived in the Ohio wilderness. He is growing up in the raw, midwestern red-brick town of Elk Mills. A restless, lonely boy, he spends his odd hours in old Doc Vickerson’s office. The village practitioner is a widower with no family of his own, and he encourages Martin’s interest in medicine.

Martin, now twenty-one years old, is a junior preparing for medical school at the sprawling University of Winnemac. In medical school, he is most interested in bacteriology, research, and the courses of Professor Max Gottlieb, a noted German biologist. After joining a medical fraternity, he makes many lifelong friends. He also falls in love with Madeline Fox, a shallow pseudointellectual who is doing graduate work in English. To the young man from the prairie, Madeline represents culture. They soon become engaged.

Martin spends many nights in research at the laboratory, and he becomes the favorite of Gottlieb. One day, Gottlieb sends him to Zenith City Hospital on an errand. There, Martin meets an attractive nurse named Leora Tozer; they are soon engaged. Martin finds himself engaged to two women at the same time. Unable to choose between them, he asks both Leora and Madeline to lunch with him. When he explains his predicament, Madeline stalks angrily from the dining room and out of his life. Leora remains, finding the situation amusing. Martin feels that his life has really begun.

Through his friendship with Gottlieb, Martin becomes a student instructor in bacteriology. Leora is called home to North Dakota. Her absence, trouble with the college dean, and too much whiskey lead Martin to leave school during the Christmas holidays. Traveling like a tramp, he arrives at Wheatsylvania, the town where Leora lives. In spite of the warnings of the dull Tozer family, Martin and Leora are married. Martin goes back to Winnemac alone. A married man now, he gives up his work in bacteriology and turns his attention to general study. Later, Leora joins him in Mohalis.

Upon completion of his internship, Martin sets up an office in Wheatsylvania with money supplied by his wife’s family. In the small prairie town, Martin makes friends of the wrong sort, according to the Tozers, but he is fairly successful as a physician. He also makes a number of enemies. Meanwhile, Martin and Leora move from the Tozer house to their own home. Martin and Leora’s first child is born dead, and they know they will never have another child.

Martin again becomes interested in research. He hears that Swedish scientist Gustaf Sondelius is to lecture in Minneapolis, so he travels there to hear Sondelius’s presentation. Martin becomes interested in public health as a means of controlling disease. Back in Wheatsylvania, still under the influence of Sondelius, he becomes acting head of the department of public health. Martin, in his official capacity, finds that a highly respected seamstress is also a chronic carrier of typhoid; he sends her to the county home for isolation. As a result, he becomes generally unpopular. He therefore welcomes the opportunity to join Almus Pickerbaugh of Nautilus, Iowa, as the assistant director of public health, at a considerable increase in salary.

In Nautilus, Martin finds that Dr. Pickerbaugh is a public-spirited evangelist with little knowledge of medicine and little interest in the scientific control of disease. Martin spends his time writing health slogans in doubtful poetic meter, lecturing to clubs, and campaigning for health through the programs Better Babies Week, Banish the Booze Week, and Tougher Teeth Week. He gradually becomes influenced by the flashy, artificial methods used by his superior. Although he tries to devote some time to research, the young doctor finds that his job takes all of his time.

While Pickerbaugh campaigns for election to the US Congress, Martin investigates the most sanitary and efficient dairy of the town. He finds that the dairy is spreading disease through a streptococcus infection in the udders of cows. Against the advice of Pickerbaugh, Martin closes the dairy and makes many enemies for himself. Despite his act, however, he is made Nautilus’s acting director of public health when Pickerbaugh is elected to Congress.

In his new capacity, Martin hires a competent assistant so that he can have more time for research in bacteriology. Martin is asked to resign, though, after he sets fire to a block of tenements infested with tuberculosis. For the next year, he works as staff pathologist of the fashionable Rouncefield Clinic in Chicago. He then publishes a scientific paper that brings him to the attention of his old friend and professor, Gottlieb, now located at the McGurk Institute of Biology in New York. Martin is glad to accept the position Gottlieb offers him.

At the McGurk Institute, Martin devotes his whole time to research, with Gottlieb as his constant friend and adviser. He works on staphylococcus germs, producing first a toxin, then an antitoxin. Under the influence of Gottlieb and Terry Wickett, Martin’s colleague at McGurk, Martin discovers the X Principle, a bacterial infection that might prove to be a cure for disease. Although Martin wants to postpone publication of his discovery until he is absolutely certain of its value, the directors of the institute insist that he make his results public at once. Before his paper is finished, however, it is learned that the same principle has already been discovered at the Pasteur Institute, where it is called a bacteriophage. After that disappointment, Martin begins work on the possibility of preventing and curing bubonic plague with the phage, as the new antitoxin is called.

Meanwhile, Dr. Sondelius arrives at the McGurk Institute. He becomes so interested in Martin’s work that he spends most of his time helping his young friend. When a plague breaks out on St. Hubert, an island in the West Indies, Martin and Sondelius are asked to help in the fight against the epidemic. Accompanied by Leora, they sail for the island of St. Hubert. Before leaving, Martin promises Gottlieb that he will conduct his experiment by deliberately refusing to treat some of the plague cases with phage. In this way, the effects of the treatment can be tabulated against a control group.

The plague spreads daily on the tropical island. Sondelius is stricken, and he dies. Martin is often away from his laboratory as he travels between villages. During one of his trips, Leora lights a half-smoked cigarette that she finds on a table in his laboratory. The tobacco has been saturated with germs from an overturned test tube. Leora dies of the plague before Martin’s return.

Martin forgets to be the pure scientist. He gives the phage to all who ask for it. Although his assistant continues to take notes to carry on the research, Martin is no longer interested in the results. When the plague begins to abate, he goes back to New York. There, lonely and unhappy, he marries Joyce Lanyon, a wealthy young widow whom he had met on St. Hubert. The marriage, however, is not a success. Joyce demands more of his time, which he is unwilling to take from his research; he feels ill at ease among her rich and fashionable friends.

Martin is offered the assistant directorship of the McGurk Institute, but he refuses the position. In spite of Joyce’s protests, he goes to join his old friend and colleague Wickett at a rural laboratory in Vermont, where they intend to run experiments, searching for a cure for pneumonia. At last, Martin believes, his work and his life are really beginning.

Bibliography

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