CONTEMPORARY MEDICINE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 17

CONTEMPORARY MEDICINE

A NOTABLE REALISTIC NOVEL.

-" Martin Arrowsmith." By Sinclair Lewis. London: Jonathan Cape (through Whiteombe and Tombs, Wellington). :

IVIr. George Eernard Shaw has expressed himself pretty plainly from time to time pu the British medical profession. Now Mr. Sinclaim Lewis, who is responsible for the inclusion of the expressions " Main Street " and " Babbitry " in modern writing and speech, has something to say about the American medical man, and it is not very flattering either. Mr. Lewis is by now recognised, as to most o£ his innumerable readers, as a singuarly able diagnostician of America's social condition. His satire, too, is as keen as a lancet. If his object in writing " Main Street " and " Babbitt" is to first bring thinking Americans to a realisation of what he sees is pathologically wrong with them in a national sense, and next to show them how they can acquire robust, health, then "Martin .Arrowsmith" may be looked upon as the third work in a fine trilogy by an American writer of our time who is as careful in his work as lie is candid in all that he has to say. "Main Street" and "Babbitt " were of particular interest to New Zealand and Australia, because of the many things they possess and the many problems they are or will be called upon to solve in common with America. There are conditions in the university life and the conduct and ethics of the medical profession in our own Dominion that are dealt with in a thoroughly, workmanlike manner (as literature) by Mr. Lewis in his latest novel, "Martin Arrowsmith." The book is not .by _ahy means smooth reading, and it contains material enough for three novels; and yet one cannot but read on and on, being deeply interested in the development of Martin Arrowsmith's career; in his unconventional, lovable, and devoted wife Leora; and, above all, in Professor Gottlieb, the German Jewish bacteriologist (probably drawn from the life). There is considerable humour in the book by way of compensation for the undoubted seriousness of purpose of its writer. Some of the humour is rough and unpleasant, but most of it is light. Martin himself comes from humble folk settled in the town of Elk Mills. Racially ho was pure British, or, as Mr. Lewis put it— . •

Typical purebred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that ho was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains, lumped together as "Jewish" and a great deal of | English, which is itself a combination of primitive Britain, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede. _ An-insight- is afforded into college life in some; of tho States, of which Winnemac University was a type. Beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select; college for' young gentlemen.. The university has a baseball field under glass ; its buildings are measnred by tho mile; it hires hundreds of young doctors of philosophy to.give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle fitting, sanitary engineering, Provencal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga growing, motorcar designing, the history of Vorouezli, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertropia kymoparalytica, and department store advertising. . . . Winnemac was tho first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio. The 12,000 students at Winnomac were animated by a single idea, to become workers with their coats on at five dollars an hour. As Martin-himself described them, and he was one among them, only in the medical section These darn' studes, ihey aren't trying to learn science ; they're simply learning a trade. Tbcj just want to get the knowledge that'll enable them to cash in. Th#y don't talk about saving lives, but about "losing cases" losing dollars. And they wouldn't mind about losing cases if it was a sensational operation that'd advertise 'em. When he deals with the medical profession as ordinarily practised in the United Slates, Mr. Lewis takes his coat, off and attacks it with bare knuckles. Apart from Martin Ai-rowsmith. his chief characters are Dr. Max Gottlieb, Professor of Bacteriology, a German Jew long resident in America, a, man whose faith is in science, not in God, and who can say after inoculating a guinea pi" with anthrax—

This poor animal will soon be dead .as Moses. Some of yon will think that it, does not matter; some of you will think", like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy is -what makes life interesting. Winnemac is the fictional description of the university. The State which gives it is name and support is, Mr. Lewis assures us, "bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana," so it is not easy from this location to find it; but the university may be accepted as a type. It is not far from Zenith, the scene of the business successes and personal shortcomings of " G. F. Babbitt, Realtor," as he liked to be called. The university had the usual Greek letter secret societies, and Martin Arrowsmith in time became a member'of the "Digamma Pi." He was an enthusiastic at work under Gottlieb as he was rowdy when at leisure; but he started out as a .hoy to " do something," and this ambition lie never allowed to die out, no matter how often it flickered and burned low. He was genuine id his devotion to Gottlieb, described as " the mystery of the university," only because he was transparently sincere and regarded scientific truth as his faith and hope. Apart from this character, the lay reader, in summing up the medical faculty at Winnemac, will probably have very little fciitli left, in'the efficacy of the Hippocratic oath to do what it is popularly supposed to do in the interests of t» ose •who take it and those to whom they minister. This is how Mr. Lewis describes some of the professors in the medical faculty at Winnemac: There was Dr. Eobertsbaw, who- still wore side whiskers _ and " chirped about fussy little maiden aunt experiments." Dr. Oliver Stout, who could " repeat more facts about the left little toe than you would have thought any one would care to learn"; Dr. Lloyd Davidson, who wonld have been a very successful shopkeeper. " From him you could learn the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him." There was Dr. "Jloseoe Geake, who was a pedler. He would have done well with oil stock "As_an otolaryngologist he believed that •onsila had been placed in the human organism for the purpose of providin" specialists with closed motors*." Thrre was Dean Silva, whose god was Sir Wil-

liam Osier, whose religion was the art of sympathetic healing. Thera were country doctors too, such as Dr. Vickerson, who warned Martin not to be " a boose-hoister like mo"; Dr. Coughlin (of Leopolis), who says he believes in foxes' lungs as " fine for asthma " ; Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, District Health Officer at Nautilus, organiser of osteopathy, Christian science, Georgia Pine, V.M.C.A., Salvation Army, Mat More Corn, Old Home, ami other " Weeks " ; Dr. Ducr, fellow-student with Martin at Winnemac, " a brilliant young surgeon " in I'ounccfield millionaires, Chicago clinic, staffed by brilliant surgeons, but where big fees are the primary consideration; and many others, including an inefficient, obstinate English surgeon-general of a British West Indian colony visited by bubonic plague. _ There are faults iit Mr. Lewis's " Martin Arrowsmith,' but he is it writer of power, a terribly truthful painter of portraits. The most.lovable character in the book, perhaps, is Leora, the wife of Martin Arrowsmith. She could not dress, she cooked abominably, she smoked always, and swore at times. Martin met her when he was a young doctor visiting a hospital. She was scrubbing a floor as a punishment. "Her imlolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were a couple of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station." Martin was already engaged at that time to Madeline Fox, who is described as " a handsome, highcoloured, high-spirited " co-ed to whom, in default of a better, Martin confines his first disillusionments. She takes the young outlaw in hand for a few unhappy restive' months. The flat which she .shares with her mother sufficiently adumbrates Madeline. It was " full of literature and decoration, a bronze Buddha from Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare's epitaph, a set of Anatole France in translation, a photograph of Cologne Cathedral, a wicker table'with a samovar whose operation no one in the university understood, and a souvenir postcard album." He invites both girls to a restaurant and tells them he is engaged to each of them, leaving them to decide. Madeline walks out in deep but not last distress, and finally Leora, after a quarrel, says to Martin:

I warn you that I am never going to give you up. I suppose you are as bad as she says. But you're mine! I warn you it isn't a bit of good your getting engaged to some one else ajain. I'd tear her eyes out! Now don't think so well of ' yourself ! I .guess you're pretty selfish. Butl don't care. You're mine ! And later on in life, when they are married, she reminds him: You're not a booster; you're a lie-hunter. : You belong in a laboratory, fishing' things out, not advertising them. Are you going on for the rest of your life, stumbling into and. having to be 'dunout again? ° Leora -Arrow-smith is one of the finest women characters in the fiction of our day, and it is with pity that the reader learns of her death. Mr. Lewis has written a great novel and one that should' certainly not bo unreadiy those engagedan-medicine^a'hd'-l education in New Zealand. ■ -i