Like his other books that I've read, this one has a more complete plot and the ideas are more fully developed.

However, it's not entirely necessary to get every single point across. At times, the story seemed to drag for me as it delved into details that I wasn't particularly interested in.

That being said, the story is filled with numerous ups and downs, tracing the life of the main character in a familiarly non-linear fashion. It really makes you stop and reflect on various aspects of life, such as goals and such.

Overall, it's definitely worth reading. However, I would recommend starting with one of his other books before taking on this particular one. This way, you can get a better sense of his writing style and build up to this more complex and detailed story.

It's important to note that everyone's reading preferences are different, so what might seem like a drawback to me could be a plus for someone else. But based on my own experience, this is the advice I would give.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER (DECLINED): 1926
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1.5 rounded down

Frankly speaking, I am a bit offended that this work won the Pulitzer Prize instead of other remarkable novels in 1925, such as The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy. At least those books had something profound to convey. However, this one is a 450+-page long tale of absolute nothingness. I could not have been more bored. The characters are dull and unlikable. We are forced to follow Martin's uninteresting life and career, where nothing exciting or worthy of mention occurs. Science is indeed great, but this is not science, nor is it really a very good novel. The writing is not particularly outstanding or interesting. It's just not bad. But the lackluster and boring plot and characters more than compensate for the mediocrity of the writing. The ending is simply ridiculous. I'm still perplexed as to why anyone thought this book needed to exist, let alone how it managed to win the Pulitzer Prize.

It seems to me that there must have been some other factors at play that I'm not aware of. Maybe it was the timing, or perhaps the judges had a different perspective. But from my point of view, this is a clear case of a wrong choice.

Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his remarkable work, Arrowsmith, in 1926. The story is set in the early 1900s and revolves around a young man named Martin Arrowsmith. He embarks on a journey to college with the aspiration of becoming a doctor. However, deep within his heart, his true passion lies in laboratory research. As he delves into his work as a research scientist, constantly seeking his next big breakthrough, he experiences several failed relationships. The book progresses at a somewhat slow pace, with the reader hoping that Martin will find some semblance of balance in his life. But alas, he never truly does. Research becomes his all-consuming life. While the writing in the book is of good quality, I couldn't help but feel that the characters could have been developed more fully. Overall, I would rate this book 3 stars.

I saw a reference that Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this 1924 novel, but refused it. Some say it is because he was angry that he had not won the award for Babbitt or Main Street, or that he got more book sales by refusing the award. After reading the summary, I was intrigued and checked it out from the library.

Arrowsmith follows the picaresque life journey of a young man in the field of medicine. Lewis obviously wanted to show many facets of modern medicine, and reportedly worked with a scientist from the Rockefeller Institute to ensure the accuracy of what he wrote. As such, it is a fascinating picture of medical practices of the 1910s to 1920s.
Because of his personality, Martin Arrowsmith changes careers often. He is scientifically astute, while at the same time extremely self-absorbed and lacking in emotional intelligence. He is unaware of how his behavior appears to others and also uninterested in appreciating how others feel. A jerk, one might say. But in the hands of Lewis, he is human and interesting, and the reader is left shaking their head at his mistakes.
MEDICAL SCHOOL: Martin is poor but one of the brightest students in the school. He admires the scientific dedication of Professor Gottlieb and is fascinated with the burgeoning field of microbiology. He drops out of the social fraternity Di Gamma because they are more interested in partying and passing notes to help each other do well on exams. He is scornful of the money-grubbing advice on how to maximize your practice by choosing the 'right' furniture for your practice and performing as many tonsillectomies as possible. Lists of drugs to prescribe are memorized without discussion of whether any of them really work. Martin manages to get himself engaged to two young women and has the bright idea of resolving the situation by arranging a meeting between the two. One storms out, so problem solved.
Leora, his fiancee and eventual wife, is loving and loyal. She has an adventurous spirit and dreams of someday traveling to France, but she doesn't aspire to high society. She is also more astute than Martin about other people. When one of his classmates moans that he is shy and women don't notice him, she retorts defiantly that he isn't shy, he just despises women.
COUNTRY DOCTOR: After receiving his degree, the only career option that seems to be open is that of a country medical practice. He and Leora move to her small Dakota farming town, where the nearest doctor is 20 miles away. Her family helps them set up a practice, but Martin's obvious youth makes the locals hesitant. They also don't approve of his morals since he refuses to join one of the local churches and is known to drink and play poker on occasion. When a diphtheria epidemic occurs, many are reluctant to accept his advice, and several children die, leading Martin to change careers.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Martin accepts a job as a public health officer in a somewhat large Iowa town. Under the guiding hand of the department head, he helps promote healthy behavior through parades and pageants. Much of his time is spent performing diagnostic tests for TB and syphilis, but he also has time to pursue research of his own. When the department head successfully runs for congress, he is promoted to acting head. But once again, he is terrible at managing relationships with staff and the town, and he is eventually forced to resign.
LARGE MEDICAL PRACTICE: Martin contacts one of his old medical school friends and lands a lab pathologist job at his swanky medical clinic in Chicago. He and Leora enjoy Chicago and the larger salary, but he is still stuck performing routine lab tests for syphilis instead of doing his own research. After a year he moves on.
RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Through Professor Gottlieb, Martin returns to basic medical research at the prestigious McGurk Institute in New York (supposedly modeled on the Rockefeller Institute). He begins researching bacteria and one day notices that his sample has died. He tries the experiment again with a similar result, so he works long hard hours to identify the X factor that is killing the germs only to be beaten to the scientific announcement by a French researcher who calls the mysterious force a 'Microphage'.
[From a modern medical standpoint, this is very interesting to me. Phages have now been identified as viruses that target bacteria. There was a great deal of research about them for a while, until the discovery of antibiotics in 1928, when they were somewhat forgotten. With antibiotic resistance a burgeoning problem, some research into phage therapy has been restarted.]
Martin continues his research into plague bacillus and phages, oblivious to the political machinations of the fellow department heads, jockeying for funding and attention from the wealthy couple who have financed the institute. His friend Professor Gottlieb is promoted to head but shares Martin's inability to manage people effectively.
EPIDEMIC: When plague is identified on a small Caribbean island, the institute sends Martin to help, and Leora insists she will accompany him. He is torn between the scientific rigor of performing a controlled trial of his Phage therapy while the plague ravages the island's populace and administrators beg him to administer the possible cure to one and all. Then he is devastated that his beloved Leora succumbs to the disease while he is busy performing the trial. After 6 months he returns to New York, lauded as a hero for stopping the epidemic but devastated personally, and aware that the clinical data is insufficient to declare the therapy a success.
SOCIAL BUTTERFLY: Several months after Leora's death, Martin marries a wealthy socialite who he met while in the Caribbean. She pushes him to play the political games to become institute head, but he isn't interested. She doesn't like it that he is sometimes more interested in his research than in being at home in time for social functions. Eventually, he decides to leave and move out to the wilds of Vermont to work with a fellow scientist friend in his own little ivory tower.
This was a fascinating picture of medicine in the 1920s. Many of the public health issues and research that Lewis debates are still current today. Martin Arrowsmith is a flawed protagonist but human and real in many ways. As a scientist, I could see much of the same types of problems and issues in my own career.

Especial para médicos


I started reading this book without any prior knowledge of Sinclair or his literature. As a doctor, I was pleasantly surprised to find passages that related to my own training. Despite it being a novel, it left me with a profound teaching - the importance of being persistent in achieving one's goals. Ironically, in 2020, I lived through a pandemic, and it mirrored similar experiences to those described in the book. The pandemic that emerged from Wuhan, China, and the fictional one in the book set in Yuhman China had striking resemblances. It made me realize how literature can sometimes capture the essence of real-life situations so accurately. This book has not only entertained me but also made me reflect on my own journey as a doctor and the challenges we face in times of crisis.

Interesting book, though flawed. It portrays a doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, who eventually becomes a pioneering microbiologist, working on bacteriophages.

Unfortunately, most of the characters are quite one dimensional, particularly the two women (Liora and Joyce). Written in the 1920's, and describing a pandemic of bubonic plague, the parallels with our 2020 - 2021 pandemic are scary.

The novel deals mainly with the conflict between basic and applied research, as well as the lacunae in medical education of the time. This was partly overcome by the new emphasis on "evidence-based medicine", which became part of the canon of standard medical education 30 years ago.

Despite the flaws, I recommend the book. It offers a unique perspective on the history of medicine and the challenges faced by scientists and doctors. It also makes us think about the importance of basic research and the need to balance it with applied research.

Moreover, the description of the pandemic in the book can help us understand the current situation better and learn from the past. Overall, it is a thought-provoking and engaging read.

In a recent interview, Abraham Verghese, a prominent doctor and writer, mentioned Arrowsmith as one of the books that people often claim inspired them to become physicians. (His personal inspiration was the novel "Of Human Bondage.") When I initially began reading Arrowsmith, it was difficult to envision how its satirical tone and indecisive main character could potentially "inspire" anyone. In fact, Martin Arrowsmith doesn't ultimately become a physician in the strictest sense. His true passion lies in research science, and the overarching conflict of the character (and one theme of the book) pertains to the struggle of medicine to evolve into a truly scientific pursuit. In 1925, when Arrowsmith was written, I believe this struggle was in a heated and intense phase. Although we now have "evidence-based medicine" and a tacit assumption that we only undertake actions that have been scientifically proven based on real data, I think this struggle still persists and is very much alive in reality.

As for the book as literature worthy of reading, Martin Arrowsmith's personal struggle actually becomes quite captivating in the end. Despite all its satire, the book's portrayal of Martin as someone with a sincere core yet helplessly buffeted by social and political forces rings fairly true and is somewhat complex. I was probably most intrigued by Martin in the middle of the book when he was attempting to make a difference as a public health official than at the end when he was realizing that he shouldn't have to fulfill his commitment to his wife if it meant even slightly compromising his obsessive love for research.

The most exasperating aspect of the book is, of course, its female characters. There is the first wife whom Lewis tries to convince us has a strong sense of self but who appears to have no wants, needs, or ambitions of her own. In contrast, the second wife is independently wealthy, has her own ideas about what makes life worthwhile, but unfortunately seems to need/demand her husband's love and attention in a way the poor little first wife never would have (and thus was revered and perfect). Most of the others are either smart-mouthed or rather silly airheads, controlling, wealthy harpies, or pretentious pseudo-intellectuals.
In conclusion, reading Arrowsmith presented me with some interesting medicine-related issues to ponder and overall an engaging story, despite its outdated attitudes and style.

I began reading Arrowsmith after delving into Babbitt, Dodsworth, and Main Street. I had also watched the movie Elmer Gantry. I was well-versed in Lewis’ satiric portrayals of twentieth-century America, which zeroed in on conformity, greed, and superficiality. I didn't anticipate much positivity about my profession from Lewis’ ‘Doctor novel’. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover some of the better literary responses to nagging questions like, Why become a physician? and How does one balance scientific practice with compassionate and empathic care? Martin Arrowsmith, MD, is an idealist who aspires to be both a research scientist and a practicing clinician. He is an imperfect hero who grapples with professional conflicts throughout his career.

Chapter 15 offers several illustrations. It commences with the young Dr. Arrowsmith perusing a catalog promoting new medical equipment for the doctor’s office. The advertisement claims that these items will wow patients and boost the doctor’s income. It even insinuates that purchasing surgical equipment can transform a presumably untrained doctor into a surgeon, further fattening the physician’s bottom line. When Martin looks at the nameplate declaring him an MD, he reflects that medical school is behind him, and he has finally become a medical practitioner. Lewis tells us, “With his first admirers, he developed his first enemies.” As he establishes himself as a newly minted, aggressive, and up-to-date doctor, Arrowsmith earns admiration from some of the younger townsfolk. But his rigid standards irk the older pharmacist and practicing doctor in his rural enclave. Against this backdrop, he is called to tend to a child with laryngeal croup of diphtheria. The budding scientist, with a particular interest in infectious disease, wants to obtain antitoxin. However, in addition to the lack of immediate availability of this treatment in his rural setting, there is the acute respiratory emergency of the child’s airway closing off. With the help of a fireman, and after narrowly avoiding being hit by a train, Martin makes his way to a nearby town and procures the antitoxin. He races to the rural farm to administer it, only to arrive too late. The child succumbs to respiratory arrest. Arrowsmith is devastated. He tells his wife he will give up medical practice. In search of solace, he travels to see an older general practitioner and describes the case and his care. The older doctor tells him he did all he could. But in the future, calling for a consultation from another doctor always impresses families and allows one to charge more! After the local paper runs a story extolling the new antitoxin and listing all the locals who helped the young doctor drive 48 miles in 79 minutes across the county to get it, everyone, including the girl’s father, agrees that Dr. Arrowsmith did all he could. The article goes on to say, “the medical profession is one of our greatest blessings”.

Over his career, Arrowsmith dabbles in everything from rural general practice to urban surgery, from research scientist to public health epidemiology, even journeying to the Caribbean to combat an epidemic of plague. The book is replete with imperfect medical heroes, all of whom display a combination of admirable and less-than-admirable qualities. Nearly all of these heroes also exhibit forms of religious and/or cultural moralism. Similar to Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, each one is a caricature.

Lewis’s description of Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of the Department of Public Health, who is a pseudo-religious zealot modeled after revivalist Billy Sunday, is characteristic: “He had in three years of practice already become didactic…he had put on weight and infallibility…he had learned many new things about which to be dull… his conversation was a series of maxims and admonitions, such as ‘I believe it’s better for general health if there weren’t any public health departments because they get a lot of people into the habit of going to free clinics instead of going to private physicians and cut down the earnings of doctors’…” Pickerbaugh organizes his rural community around special weeks, such as ‘Better Babies Week’, ‘Three Cigars a Day Week” and ‘Stop the Spitter Week’. He gives lectures to service groups like the Elks, Masons, and Rotary on topics such as ‘health first, safety second, and booze nowhere A-tall’. With the help of his wife and eight daughters (Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Joaquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, Arbuta, and Gladiola), Pickerbaugh uses the schools and churches of his community to stage nearly continuous rallies and festivals for his versions of public health. He advocates for a Cabinet-level Secretary of Health and Eugenics. Appropriately, he follows his local health crusade with a successful run for the United States Congress.

After Pickerbaugh departs for Congress, Martin is promoted to Director of the local Department of Health. Lacking Pickerbaugh’s eloquence and enthusiasm, Martin is unable to replace the community organization that made Pickerbaugh both a local legend and a cartoonish character. The community resents the loss of special weeks, lectures, drives, and fests. Even worse, when he attempts to clean up the rats in a tenement area, he alienates property owners and once again antagonizes older doctors, pastors, and other authority figures. The first step is to slash his pay. The second is to fire him outright.

Soon after, Martin applies to a surgical clinic in Chicago. He leaves to work with a young surgeon named Angus Duer. The messianic salesmanship and fervor of his previous public health job are replaced by surgical practice in a competitive urban environment. Lewis describes the surgical clinic’s doctors as “master technicians, readers of papers at medical conferences, executives and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred peering doctors, or to give well-bred and exceedingly final orders to subordinates…never doubting themselves; great priests and healers…men of measured merriment.” Although Martin is in awe of Duer, whom he envisions becoming the President of the American Medical Association in twenty years, it is equally evident that Duer and the entire clinic are not supportive of Martin’s basic research, preferring that if he must conduct research at all, he should focus on something practical. In their eyes, practical means contributing to a greater number of patients and collected fees.

The next stop for Martin and his wife is New York at the McGurk Institute, modeled after the Rockefeller Institute. Dr. Max Gottlieb becomes Martin’s next hero. Dr. Gottlieb wishes for Martin to ‘succeed’, by which he means; “The normal man does not care much what he does except that he should eat and 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… May Koch bless you!”

Martin responds with his own prayer of the scientist, “God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results... God give me strength to not trust God.” When later asked about his salary at the research institute, Martin replies, ‘I forgot to ask’.

In his McGurk research, Martin identifies an X-factor or bacteriophage produced by some strains of bacteria, which can then kill other bacteria strains. He turns to his next hero, Gustav Sondelius, for guidance. Sondelius, who dreams of organizing a school of tropical medicine, influences Martin to go abroad in search of epidemics to combat. He travels to Blackwater, the capital of St. Hubert in the West Indies. There he will research, treat, and attempt to prevent the spread of the plague. Ever the scientist, Martin views it as an opportunity to test his bacteriophage in a controlled trial, administering it to only half of his potential patients. His mentor, Sondelius, wants Martin to adopt an ‘all at once’ approach, which would involve killing as many carrier rates as possible, quarantining patients, and using his phage and all other weapons for all the islanders. Adding to the drama, Martin’s long-suffering and ever-faithful wife, Leora, insists on accompanying him on his dangerous journey. Sondelius focuses on rat extermination and becomes the most effective warrior against the plague. Martin manages his trial and demonstrates the clinical efficacy of his phage treatment. Leora contracts the plague and dies, leaving Martin a widower.

The protagonist’s workaholism, competitiveness, and selfishness hinder all of his personal relationships, especially marriage. His moralism and lack of resiliency impede his ability to find any degree of personal serenity. Martin remarries his research patron’s daughter, Joyce Lanyon. Together they have a son. Unable to compromise on anything related to his science, Martin effectively abandons his son to the care of his independently wealthy wife. His final words to his son are, “Come to see me after you have grown up.”

Arrowsmith is rightfully regarded as a story of moral conflicts. E L Doctorow, in his Afterword, tells us that Lewis is “the kind of prophet who tells us what we do not want to hear.” Doctorow continues, “Martin Arrowsmith’s struggle to be a scientist is a matter of freeing himself from a universe of Babbitts.” George F Babbitt was Lewis’ quintessential creation, the prototypic American of the early twentieth century: a conforming, superficial, glib, irresponsible, social climber who is ultimately revealed to be intellectually and morally bankrupt. “Throughout every stage of Martin Arrowsmith’s career, and at whatever level of society, he is appalled, alienated, cowed, or simply defeated, by the moral shallowness, inanity, stupidity, self-delusion, greed, and hypocrisy of most of the men and women with whom he comes in contact.”

I completed reading Arrowsmith hopeful that one could bridge many of the moral conflicts inherent in attempting to practice scientific medicine while maintaining empathy for one’s patients in all their uniqueness. But as for whether all of that could be achieved within the context of a healthy personal life for the care provider, I was less certain. Arrowsmith left me with as many questions as answers and with a rather disheartening feeling.

I truly have a great appreciation for the writing of Sinclair Lewis. His works are filled with well-developed characters who possess both strengths and weaknesses. One can't simply label them as either true villains or true heroes.

The central character in this story is Martin Arrowsmith. We accompany Martin as he embarks on his journey through medical school. It is there that he discovers his passion for research and dreams of becoming a scientist. However, instead, he meets Leora and after a rather complicated courtship (during which Martin ends up engaged to two women), he ultimately marries her. To support his wife, he decides to become a small town doctor.

As Dr. Arrowsmith struggles to understand his patients and becomes fixated on uncovering the cause of a typhoid outbreak, one experiences both compassion and irritation towards him. He manages to find the source and is so eager to share this discovery with everyone that it never crosses his mind that he might offend the carrier.

Arrowsmith eventually secures a job in a research facility, but he still has to grapple with the concepts of "progress" and the politics associated with the job. Throughout all of this, his patient wife patiently waits for him, listens to him, and even makes a sandwich or two.

Lewis has crafted a book that may seem slow-paced, but it is incredibly profound. I wholeheartedly recommend this work to all.

General Fiction

The synopsis of this novel was truly remarkable, especially considering the current pandemic times. It held so much promise and piqued my interest. However, once I took the plunge and started reading, I was rather disappointed. I had expected it to be a thrilling science fiction adventure filled with exciting actions. But to my surprise, it leaned more towards general fiction. The story lacked the intensity and excitement that I had anticipated. It seemed to meander along without a clear direction or purpose. The characters were not as developed as they could have been, and the plot failed to engage me on a deeper level. Overall, while the synopsis was great, the actual novel fell short of my expectations and turned out to be a rather boring read.

This author, in this novel, appears to me as a clear inheritor of Mark Twain's satirical bite and sheer funniness.

The prose may not be an aesthetic rival for Gatsby or Absalom, but it's not striving for an arresting style. Instead, it aims for snappy directness and glides along like Twain at his best or Dickens in Pickwick.

I'm truly stunned by some of the reviews here. Lewis was clearly a sharp comedian and a relentless critic of American society as it was (and basically still is). In this novel, it rivals Babbitt in that its characters possess more depth and heart, while Babbitt is only home to caricatures that we don't quite like.

As upsetting as the'message' beneath the surface may be, this is a book that allows for lightness and, dare I say in a literary masterpiece, smiling. Garrison Keillor and Kurt Vonnegut strike me as inheritors of Lewis, whether consciously or not.

Having studied literature through graduate school, I'm dismayed at the low status Lewis holds in the larger academic consciousness. He may not be able to trump a Faulkner or a Hemingway pound for pound, but he's not running the same race.

This is a book that will make you laugh, make you shake your head, and make you think. It is not an overwhelming portrayal of life as it's lived. We have Proust for that, we have Woolf. A social-commentary novel with well-drawn characters that are not inevitable tragedies of the mundane is not so common. So, enjoy it.

Arrowsmith, the 1926 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is widely regarded as a classic "science novel", as noted in Wikipedia. It delves into the moral quandaries that biomedical researchers might face. I must confess that it took me some time to get into this novel. However, after reading about one-third of it, I became completely engrossed. It wasn't exactly a page-turner that had me on the edge of my seat, but I was still sad when I reached the last page. I truly relished the arcing story that followed the protagonist from his days as a young medical student throughout his entire career. Honestly, I was astonished by the level of sophistication in medical science during the 1920s. I suppose I shouldn't have been, considering that quantum mechanics was developed around the same time. It stands to reason that bacteriology and scientific medicine would also have been established roughly simultaneously. This book offers a wonderful blend of science, relationships, love, and human drama.