Yesterday I referred to the book Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, wherein one of the characters (Prof. Gottlieb) makes disparaging remarks about organic chemistry. I have duplicated the full passage from Chapter 2 at the bottom of this post. Enjoy! (And here’s a link to the entire book. You can read it for Spring Break.)

Some reading notes: Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), not to be confused with Upton Sinclair, is best known for writing several novels (Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and It Can’t Happen Here (1935), to name a few) that evoke life in early 20th century America. He was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930). Lewis also won a Pulitzer for Arrowsmith in 1926, but he refused to accept the award.

The language and manners of the characters in Lewis’ books may feel terribly outdated to a modern reader, but if you can get beyond these, you can learn a lot about where American culture came from. My own informal research suggests that Arrowsmith holds a particular appeal book for scientists (at least those who read). A lab mate in graduate school kept a copy at his desk so that he could read the bold text in the following passage aloud to the rest of the lab whenever he felt the need. Beyond pure entertainment, Arrowsmith explores the tension between applied and pure research, a topic that may be even more relevant today than it was a century ago.

The following passage begins with the title character, Martin Arrowsmith, who is a young college student attending a large (for that time) Midwest university in the early 1900’s. Martin’s rural upbringing (introduced in Chapter 1) has not prepared him for academics or professions, but this has not diminished his intense ambition one jot. He is determined to find someone at the university that he respects so that he can “prove himself” and he sets his sights on Prof. M. Gottlieb, a German bacteriologist/physical chemist who wants nothing more than to conduct his research and be left alone by students, most of whom he views as disinterested, unmotivated “potatoes.” “Old Gottlieb’s” disdain for Martin, of course, makes him a perfect target for the ambitious undergrad!

There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him — He halted in Gottlieb’s private laboratory, a small, tidy apartment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.

If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously precise chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and delicate were the scientist’s thin hands among the papers. He looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.

“Vell? Yes?”

“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a medic freshman, Winnemac B.A. I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry —”

“No. It is not time for you.”

“Honest, I know I could do it now.”

“There are two kinds of students the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind — they are very few! — they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year.”

“But honestly, with my chemistry —”

“Have you taken physical chemistry?”

“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”

“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year.”

Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, “Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?”

“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart’s dress — and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?”

“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:

“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemistry. I’ll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he’ll look foolish in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won’t take sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room. . . . I want to take bacteriology — now!”