Arrowsmith: Summary. Or, The Novel that Rendered This Blog Comotose
So, that was November, eh? Man. Okay, so Arrowsmith almost killed us. It was long and a bit boring and it became hard to think of interesting things to say about it that didn’t sound like whining. But we decided fuck it, let’s try anyway. So, we’re gonna loosen things up and do these in a bit more conversational style.
In the meantime, however, it is only fair to summarize to get us started.
Arrowsmith is the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor, and the book covers almost his entire medical education and career. Following a brief intro describing the boy’s first mentor — a local doc in a tiny cow town who has a little problem with the glug glug but is happy to let the boy Arrowsmith hang around the office and play with the specimens — the book spends its first, expansive section on Martin’s medical education at a state university, among the first of the huge institutions created out on the prairie.
Arrowsmith joins a frat, chums around with a bunch of other medical student, some skilled and priggish, some friendly, boorish, and rather bad doctors. His idealized conception of the selfless medical man is swiftly punctured by encounters with actual professors, from the old docs who rely on gut instinct and folk remedies to get by to the new docs who view a thriving practice as a mere launching pad for a political career, or better yet, a chance to get their face on the label of a patent medicine bottle. Only one of Martin’s professors retains his admiration and becomes a lifelong mentor to him: Max Gottlieb, a gloomy German who couldn’t give two shits about treating patients but is passionately dedicated to research, pulling all-nighters over his lab bench to ferret out the root causes of disease. At the time the book was written, the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, but though it was known that microscopic agents caused disease, how they did so — and more importantly, how they might be prevented from doing so — was still a hot research topic. (Wiki informs me that Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin in 1928; Arrowsmith won its Pulitzer two years before.)
Martin becomes enchanted with Gottleib’s brand of saintly asceticism and takes up lab work himself, but he soon hits a snag. Or rather, he picks up a snag, in the form of a rather slatternly young nursing student at the local hospital called Leora. (Their meet cute? He finds her taking an unauthorized break when she’s supposed to be cleaning the wards and bums a smoke off her.) Martin dumps his existing girlfriend and decides, rashly, to marry Leora right away. He ditches school for a couple weeks so they can break the news to her family — a maneuver that nearly gets him bounced out sans degree — her fam flips a wig, they get married anyway, yet can’t afford to live together because Martin’s barely scraping by on a small fund left to him by his parents, eventually he has to beg her folks for money, the whole thing’s a bad scene, basically.
Because he’s married now and needs to support his wife, Martin abandons research and decides, with his in-law’s help, to set up as a country doctor following graduation in Wheatsylvania, North Dakota. After many pages of bickering, boredom, and small town scandal, Martin starts spending all his time out in the garage, tinkering with home-grown experiments. Eventually his work results in a scientific paper, which in its turn is enough to get him a nod from his former mentor Gottlieb, and helps Martin’s reputation to the extent that he’s able to blow town for sunnier climes, or at least, for a post as assistant public health director at a small midwestern city, Nautilus.
At first Martin’s excited by the opportunity to put some of his evolving ideas about disease prevention into practice. But after about 6 seconds with his new boss, Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a super-cheerful bastard posessing a teacup’s worth of knowledge about the practice of medicine but gallons and gallons of pious, patriotic swill on the subject of health, vitality, vitamins and so-forth that he likes to spew at luncheon club meetings — kind of a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and John Harvey Kellogg — Martin realizes that his new gig is about 90% mindless boosterism to 10% actual scientific and public service work, and only that 10% so long is it doesn’t interfere with the usual practices of the B.S.D.s in town by knocking down their vermin-infested tenements. Having 29,400 more people around does provide a few more opportunities for escapism that Wheatsylvania, and Martin tries a couple different ones to break up his career monotony — a) hanging with what passes for the “fast crowd” of the town and drinking a lot, and b) flirting with one of his boss’s daughters. The faithful Leora — who remains a blunt, slouch-socked, gum-snapper, permanently unsuited to the role of prominent doctor’s wife, but devoted to Martin — doesn’t mind a any too much, but rolls her eyes at b and pretty much orders Marin to snap out of it. Which he does, without ever really getting poonanynani, thereby eliminating the danger of causing conflict and interesting plot developments.
Instead, Martin is once again called to the bench, and after a series of twists and turns ends up with a new job as a researcher at a prestigious private institute in New York City. This, too, proves not to be an Eden on second glance: There’s vicious competition among the researchers, the heads of the institute all have their heads up their asses, etc. But Martin is once again reuinited with his old pal Gottleib, also a researcher at the institute, and gets down to some serious work. After a time — and many many pages on the state of bacteriological research at the time — Martin discovers the hot ticket, a new form of antibiotic that may have the potential to cure the plague. His bosses at the institute are preassuring him to publish his results, but his old mentor warns him again and again that he must conduct full, unimpeachable studies in order to really prove he’s got the goods — otherwise he’ll thrill the press and be shredded by fellow scientist. So Martin heads down to the Carribbean, where the plague has broken out on a small island, and he sets out to test his new “phage,” as he calls it. Martin wants to do his experiment the pure science way — some people get the real cure, some get bubkis to act as a control — but after a very hostile reception, when his new drug begins to look like it’s actually helping the island government comes down on him like a ton of bricks, wanting him to hand it out to everybody (and thus ruining his experiment). Martin is unmoved by their pressure, caring more for proving his point and finally coming up with some publishable results — until his wife, Leora, falls victim to the disease, and dies. At which point Marin loses his shit and starts handing the stuff out left right and center.
A grief-stricken Martin eventually comes home, salvages what he can of his results, and publishes them. At the same time, an acquaintance he made while on the island — a sophisticated, wealthy young widow — is rekindled again in New York, and he soon falls for her and marries her, and even has a kid. Wife No. 2 sets about making Martin into a great man of affairs — an endeavor made easy by the success of his plague treatments. Even though the results weren’t scientifically perfect, with a little help from the good PR men of the institute Martin is soon Hero Doc and in line for the directorship.
But just as ultimate public and professional recognition comes close, Martin gets fidgity once again. Looking out at the prospect of a life filled with black tie dinners, while his test tubes gather dust, he decides to chuck it all again, divorcing his wife, renouncing any claim to her fortune, resigning from the institute and retiring to a little cabin in the woods in Vermont run by a fellow scientist, where he divided his time between experiments and log-splitting. And there, blessedly, the book ends.
