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I was a bit apprehensive before starting this book, because it was published in 1924 and I thought perhaps the language and structure would be too old-fashioned and it would be terribly boring and a drag to get through. I was very pleasantly surprised, however. The language itself is a bit old-fashioned, but the structure is not, and the book is thoughtful, funny, and enjoyable to read. It’s about this guy Martin Arrowsmith who goes to college and then medical school (“medic school;” apparently back then you didn’t have to go to college first), and his life as a doctor. He tries out private practice in a semi-rural area, public health, private practice as part of a large and rich partnership in the city, and his real love in life, research. I was surprised that the themes match so closely with the themes in medicine today. The issues of doing procedures only for profit, commercialism in medicine, the idea of “selling out”, the difficulties of being a small-town doctor, the lure of research, funding for research and the absurdity of the direction of research institutes, and so many others. Martin as a student rails against selling out and doing procedures for profit, just becoming a doctor for the money, and then at one point is drawn into a practice where he is forced to do just that. He believes research is the loftiest of goals, and in fact reveres his mentor Professor Gottlieb as almost a saint or a god of research. As a public health official he is faced with a director spouting silly poetry about cleanliness and in fact giving in to all of the businesses and doing nothing for the real scientific goals of containing disease. When he travels to a Caribbean island to treat the plague with his newly discovered bacteriophage, he forces himself to run a scientific experiment of it and only treat half of the people in a certain village, in order to have controls. His beloved wife Leora dies, which is a very sad part of the book. He remarries into high society but hates it, he returns to research and makes something of a name for himself. I can’t go through the entire book in detail, but overall the issues it addresses are still so relevant, and the writing is very good, so I think it is a very good book. The weakest aspect is the portrayal of Leora, who is really just a shell of a person who is content to sit around all day and worship Martin. And the book doesn’t seem to have any real plot structure, just sort of travels along at the same pace and then suddenly ends. But neither of those is enough to seriously diminish the overall quality of this excellent book.

2022-11-14 16:17