copyright 1925; P.F. Collier & Son publishers, New York; hardbound; very good condition with unmarked pages; Ex Libris sticker inside front cover; no dust jacket.
Description -
Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis declined). Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author.
Arrowsmith is an early major novel dealing with the culture of science. It was written in the period after the reforms of medical education flowing from the Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910, which had called on medical schools in the United States to adhere to mainstream science in their teaching and research.
Plot -
Arrowsmith tells the story of bright and scientifically minded Martin Arrowsmith as he makes his way from a small town in the Midwest to the upper echelons of the scientific community. (He is born in Elk Mills, Winnemac, the same fictional state in which several of Lewis's other novels are set.) Along the way he experiences medical school. He becomes engaged to one woman, cheats on her with another woman, becomes engaged to the second woman and then finally invites both women to a lunch to settle the issue.
He eventually insults his mentor, Max Gottlieb, and is suspended from medical school. He takes up life as an ordinary worker, then marries Leora with her family supporting him based on the promise that he would take up private practice as the only doctor in tiny Wheatsylvania, North Dakota. Frustrated with private practice, he becomes a public health official in Iowa and becomes romantically involved with the young daughter of the public health director. After a series of political disputes, he resigns and joins the staff of an exclusive private hospital in Chicago. Finally, Arrowsmith is recognized by his former medical school mentor, Max Gottlieb, for a scientific paper he has written and is invited to take a post with a prestigious research institute in New York. The book's climax deals with Arrowsmith's discovery of a phage that destroys bacteria and his experiences as he faces an outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional Caribbean island...