Arrowsmith quotes

“

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.

“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.

“

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.”

He was a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse. So brilliant was his work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic.

Martin compared Angus Duer to a razor blade on a January morning; he hated him, was uncomfortable with him, and envied him.

He knew that in biology Duer had been too busy passing examinations to ponder, to get any concept of biology as a whole.

“

Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!

”

They led him carefully to bed.

He was so filled with facts that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.

When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had forgotten everything he had learned.

He agitated the mouth of the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “

Every time you take the plug from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, iss the beginning of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science.

”

“Take one half c.c. of the culture.

There are two kinds of M.D.s⁠—those to whom c.c. means ‘cubic centimeter’ and those to whom it means ‘compound cathartic.’ The second kind are more prosperous.

”

“Some of you 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 iss what makes life interesting.

”

These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, “

Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but pondering upon it.

And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve‑ry accurate quantitative notes—in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads.

And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve‑ry accurate quantitative notes—in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads.

I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them.

I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, to derife from it the calmness which iss the secret of laboratory skill.”

He remarked, “Is it your combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?” or “How about ingurgitating a few calories?” But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage.

The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.

In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent associates in Digamma Pi.

Though he had come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new waltz called the “Boston.”

There was no strength, no grace, no knowledge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption.

If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry for every skill.

Clif’s opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to marry her.

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men, and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else.

Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a time.

Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is the way!

Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the nice correct views of science⁠—out they go!

I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the underneath principle.”

“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and—Oh, my dear, I do like you!”

Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.

He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. “

Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up.

I suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish—I’m a hussy. But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well of yourself!

“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora—I swear it isn’t—I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t don’t think she’s brighter than you are. She’s glib but—Oh, let’s stop talking!

I’ve found you! My life’s begun!

”

Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.

While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken sandwich and assented, “Um-huh.”

“

Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it’s no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first impress your personality on the people who have the dollars.

Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must always use salesmanship on him.

It did not soften Bert’s mood to have the clerk remark that if Martin and Leora were of age, there was nothing he could do, and he didn’t “care a damn who’s talking—I’m running this office!”

Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin perfect, even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.

It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.

it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to Leora, smiling with virtue at having determined to be prudent, he heard Mr. Tozer cackling, “Ory, you go on up to bed now—in your own room!”

That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from her.

Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming. He waited, taut. She did not come. He peeped out, determined to find her room. His deep feeling about his brother-in-law suddenly increased. Bert was parading the hall, on guard.

They said, with reason, that he was so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s sake, that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.

Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.

The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfulest critics.

He was human enough, when he meditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of inventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack of fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic.

He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic.

He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He was of the great benefactors of humanity.

Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not so unreasonable—usually—as to demand both freedom and the fruits of popular slavery.

“Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world pay me for doing what I want and what they do not want?”

If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of France and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britain so much valued that she gave them titles almost …

Martin was pleased.

He had been sober and industrious so long now!

Wise’s shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it and open wheat country. It was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke.

“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”

Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t miss it” has ever failed to miss it.

Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse.

that to get rid of avoidable disease and produce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public health officials.

Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.

Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.

He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine and tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work out his own device for growing anaerobic cultures, but he had been trained by the Gottlieb who remarked,

“Any man dat iss unable to build a filter out of toot’-picks, if he has to, would maybe better buy his results along with his fine equipment.”

Out of a large fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made his apparatus.

he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gallstones to heartburn as smallpox. They greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t—smallpox?”

More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rends tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls their treasure.

When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the other half clamored, “Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics on the brain!”

For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it.

Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance.

He was a man who never merely talked: he either bubbled or made orations.

He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the Director’s private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:

Hopelessly, “I don’t think I can make it for lunch but—Well, we’ll dine with you Sunday.”

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

Martin’s imaginative dismay at being caught here by Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a fury of Old Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.

“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were terribly smart. It’s just—There’s other things I think you can do better. What shall we do tonight; have a cold snack at home or go to the cafeteria?”

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday.

Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to develop the Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence School Week, Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.

A Week is not merely a week.

If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which means to get more money, it calls in those few energetic spirits who run any city, and proclaims a Week.

… questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such crusades.

He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct.

To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined”—this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.

To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really matter?

Does truth matter⁠—clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s truth?

Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most complex woman.

He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small Midwestern denominational college.

Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.

He held Orchid’s quiet hand⁠—and was lonely for Leora.

The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic.

“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m not going to mess it.

God help any man that likes his work and his wife! He’s beaten from the beginning.

”

and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one textbook and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular!

He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists:

I can’t tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad preliminary survey. Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision which comes from coordinating all mental domains.”

Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey.

“Now you’ll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year or more, in getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan’t ask you for any reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you yourself are satisfied with your progress, I shall be content.

“Oh. Him!” murmured Dr. Tubbs.

Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such politeness.

He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even in this paradise.

With all his amateurish fumbling,

Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.

While he puttered his insignificant way through the early years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a lively existence under its placid surface.

And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capitola’s most useful friends,

“Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”

But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr.

Mind you, I’m anti-German all right—I think they’re probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let’s go back and do some more calculus … Darling, my working nights doesn’t bore you too much, does it?”

Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she could be unannoyingly silent.

At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only defender of his country who was not comfortable in the garb of heroes. The most dismal of the staff-members was Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee sandy-mustached head of the Department of Biology.

If they had their way, these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton—yes, or probably a Christ!—giving up everything they did for the world to address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids.

Nothing takes so much courage as to keep hard and clearheaded.

”

He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite.

But he had one gift: curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary.

Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed with pretty modesty, “Silly! I’ve made some error!” and gone his ways.

He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn’t to worry about him. He fumbled down the corridor, lighting matches, trying to find electric switches.

At night all halls are haunted.

Even in the smirkingly new McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide.

Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in his bed, be smothered, die writhing.

He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.

He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cowardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a child?

Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.

He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade forth to be pawed by every blind devotee and mud-spattered by every blind enemy.

He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and begged to be saved from Success and Holabirds and A.

But I am getting old. And you are my friend. I am sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful—for a while … Martin, it iss nice that you will corroborate D’Herelle.

That is science: to work and not to care⁠—too much⁠—if somebody else gets the credit

… Shall I tell Tubbs about D’Herelle’s priority, or will you?”

“Wouldn’t have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone. Damn these old men, damn these Men of Measured Merriment, these Important Men that come and offer you honors. Money. Decorations. Titles. Want to make you windy with authority.

Honors! If you get ’em, you become pompous, and then when you’re used to ’em, if you lose ’em you feel foolish.

“So I’m not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won’t have her new dresses and flat and everything. We—Won’t be so much fun in the lil old flat, now. Oh, quit whining!

In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.

Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad.

They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.

“

Sandy, don’t you know I haven’t any life outside of you?

I might’ve had, but honestly, I’ve been glad to let you absorb me. I’m a lazy, useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you comfortable.

“Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don’t you dare use those old stuck-up expressions that husbands have been drooling out to wives forever and ever!

I’m not a wife, any more’n you’re a husband. You’re a rotten husband!

You neglect me absolutely.

“

Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own death, keep you from making this plague experiment complete.

And as my friend—If you do this, something will yet have come out of my Directorship. If but one fine thing could come, to justify me—”

With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense enough, Sondelius’s troops made a ring about the burning village, shouting insanely as they clubbed the fleeing rats and ground squirrels. In the flare of devastation

Sondelius was a fiend, smashing the bewildered rats with a club, shooting at them as they fled, and singing to himself all the while the obscene chantey of Bill the Sailor.

But at dawn he was nursing the sick in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies how to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way discussing methods of poisoning ground squirrels in their burrows.

God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea and mountains. He made the fruit to grow so well that man need not work—and then He laughed, and stuck in volcanoes and snakes and damp heat and early senility and the plague and malaria.

But the nastiest trick He ever played on man was inventing the flea.

”

“

I want you to see how an agnostic can die!

“I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls and Holy Week at Sevilla. And one good last drunk! I am very peaceful, Slim.

No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what easygoing workers called “spiteful.” To them the joyous spite of crushing the almost-good was more natural than creation.

Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cumbered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?

“All right!” he rejoiced. “Let ’em come! Maybe I’ll anticipate ’em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got something, from the St. Swithin test, even if I did let things slide for a while. I’ll take my tables to a biometrician.

The old man looked as though he half understood; he peered at him, then shook his head and whimpered, “Versteh nicht.” His arrogant eyes were clouded with ungovernable slow tears.

Martin understood that never could he be punished now and cleansed. Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting him.

Martin closed his flat—their flat—with a cold swift fury, lest he yield to his misery in finding among Leora’s possessions a thousand fragments which brought her back:

“Why, that’s not so darn bad, Slim!”

The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came.

He desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact;

He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of toothpaste.

He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for my blood!”

He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting them in places where they could not be found, then popping in menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for them.

But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.

Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place “Birdies’ Rest.”

He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.

In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their monkeys, their laboratories and garçons, and their unbroken leisure; they began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing.

Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their masters in seven dialects.

“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. “I feel like lettin’ ’em go and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from pneumonia?”

He was elucidating it to her in their—in her—car, on the way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, “What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn’t be polite!”

“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked up to something that’s worth being free for!”

he exulted.

He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry Wickett. He saw that Clif was as different from Terry as from Rippleton Holabird.

Terry was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew.

But Clif—