Arrowsmith
With an afterword by E. L. Doctorow--the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of one man's pursuit of intellectual freedom in the face of ignorance and corruption, from the author of Babbit Arrowsmith, the most widely read of Sinclair Lewis's novels, is the incisive portrait of a man passionately devoted to science. As a bright, curious boy in a small Midwestern town, Martin Arrowsmith spends his free time in old Doc Vickerson's office avidly devouring medical texts. Destined to become a physician and a researcher, he discovers that societal forces of ignorance, greed, and corruption can be as life-threatening as the plague. Part satire, part morality tale, Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the mystery and power of science while giving enduring life to a singular American hero's struggle for integrity and intellectual freedom in a small-minded world. With an Introduction by Sally E. Parry
and an Afterword by E. L. Doctorow
and an Afterword by E. L. Doctorow
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Community Reviews
Sinclair Lewis refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize for this extraordinary novel, but don't refuse the opportunity to read it. Lewis writes with devastating precision, creativity, and wicked humor, while skewering the abundant egotism, vanity, greed and self-aggrandizement he finds in his fellow human beings.
This novel follows Dr. Martin Arrowsmith from small Midwest town (the setting of most of Lewis' works) in "medic" school through his career, during which he is constantly challenged to balance the ideals he learned as a scientific researcher to pursue "truth," with the pressures of the healthcare market.
Arrowsmith absorbed the philosophy of Professor Max Gottlieb, a slightly mysterious, arrogant German-Jewish researcher who intimidates and ridicules most of his students as unworthy of his attention, but who prizes "going slow" to ensure lab results are iron-proof before publishing results. The shadow of Max Gottlieb hangs over Martin Arrowsmith as he discovers the harsher realities of life as a small country doctor, and later, the political realities of working in a public health department under a man more dedicated to finding a way to Congress than to doing his job.
When Arrowsmith later works as a medical researcher for a company trying to fast-track medicines and cosmetic wonders to market, he is told it's "old-fashioned" and parochial to withhold publishing, because they live in an age of commerce and competition. Martin is outraged: "He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of now bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow."
The stakes for Arrowsmith's philosophy become grave when he is asked to go to the Caribbean to help with an outbreak of plague. There, his training to use controls in his experiments and "not to hurry" any inoculation before its time clashes with the grim reality of people dying by the score each day on the Island. Arrowsmith struggles to do what's right, wrestling constantly with Gottlieb's standard of total scientific purity versus saving those he can.
Written in 1925, this novel is still amazingly current as a look at human nature, the world of health care, and the forces that can corrupt both.
This novel follows Dr. Martin Arrowsmith from small Midwest town (the setting of most of Lewis' works) in "medic" school through his career, during which he is constantly challenged to balance the ideals he learned as a scientific researcher to pursue "truth," with the pressures of the healthcare market.
Arrowsmith absorbed the philosophy of Professor Max Gottlieb, a slightly mysterious, arrogant German-Jewish researcher who intimidates and ridicules most of his students as unworthy of his attention, but who prizes "going slow" to ensure lab results are iron-proof before publishing results. The shadow of Max Gottlieb hangs over Martin Arrowsmith as he discovers the harsher realities of life as a small country doctor, and later, the political realities of working in a public health department under a man more dedicated to finding a way to Congress than to doing his job.
When Arrowsmith later works as a medical researcher for a company trying to fast-track medicines and cosmetic wonders to market, he is told it's "old-fashioned" and parochial to withhold publishing, because they live in an age of commerce and competition. Martin is outraged: "He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of now bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow."
The stakes for Arrowsmith's philosophy become grave when he is asked to go to the Caribbean to help with an outbreak of plague. There, his training to use controls in his experiments and "not to hurry" any inoculation before its time clashes with the grim reality of people dying by the score each day on the Island. Arrowsmith struggles to do what's right, wrestling constantly with Gottlieb's standard of total scientific purity versus saving those he can.
Written in 1925, this novel is still amazingly current as a look at human nature, the world of health care, and the forces that can corrupt both.
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