[from] Arrowsmith

by Sinclair Lewis

[In this 1925 novel, Lewis shows us that issues we think of as contemporary; such as the debate over public health versus personal freedom, the role of money and politics in pharmaceutical research, and understanding and stopping the spread of communicable diseases, have a history that goes back to the turn of the twentieth century. Much of what science has set out to do—eliminate germs through antibiotics, eliminate viruses through vaccines, etc.—comes with a Pandora’s box of ethical conflict and the ability of the microscopic to evade our weapons.

Lewis presents these issues in the context of the relationship between Gottleib, the scientist, and Arrowsmith, his mentee, who, to Gottleib’s distress, tries his hand at medicine and public health before finally returning to the humble path of his mentor.]

“He [Gottleib] had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in any age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infections which will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb’s researches, for he was not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He sought their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction, basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busy biologists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for this man who, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing infectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing infectious diseases at all.

He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be the destruction of all human life.”

***

[Later, he advises Arrowsmith:]

“Popularizers and publicists are scoundrels.  There is a treachery to the cause of science in every mode of scientific occupation except the severest and most skeptical research.  Work ten years, if need be, at the verification of the minutest details.  Observe a thousand times before you theorize.  Never be satisfied until you have proved each point beyond the possibility of error.  Take no thought for fame or money, do not be misled even by a desire to throw open the benefits of science to mankind.  It is only when a theory is established finally as a fact that it becomes really valuable.

“To be a scientist — it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer.  It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat, sleep, and make love.  But the scientist is intensely religious – he is so religious that he will not accept quarter truths, because they are an insult to his faith.”

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith 1925.  This work is in the public domain.