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50:169 Doctors in Film

Film Notes

Arrowsmith (1931)

Based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1925, this film follows Martin Arrowsmith into his life as a physician devoted to two loves: his wife and scientific research. See Jackie Duffin's description of the film (the link is below, "Film Synopsis) to see the wide variety of events and issues depicted, from medical school and small-town practice to cutting edge scientific research and colonial public health in the early 20th century.

Questions for discussion:

• what qualities distinguish the good physician from the good scientist, as depicted through Arrowsmith?
• identify some of the routines and the challenges of small-town practice.
• what is the role of the doctor's wife?
• how are colonial issues and racial differences depicted?
• the principles of scientific research are made to confront the principles of medical practice -- how do these play out? what are the assumptions that drive the different perspectives on what should be done with the phage injections?
• what are the personal, social, economic and political influences that interfere with the pursuit of "pure" science?

Books behind the film:

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925). Sinclair Lewis won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel—and he was later to be the first U.S. writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Arrowsmith began as a collaboration with bacteriologist Paul De Kruif and is intended to be a critique of most medical institutions in the U.S., or at least of the self-importance of many of the men who lead them. Young Martin Arrowsmith’s ultimate career as a research scientist takes him to medical school, smalltown medical practice, medium-sized town public health official and director, laboratory technician, and research scientist. Through all these phases he must pit his drive to do “good science” against the less noble aspirations of those people and institutions he works for. At the same time, his own drive for knowledge engenders his health and happiness.

Paul De Kruif, Microbe Hunters (1926). De Kruif writes his historical accounts of medical and scientific discovery in the style and language of a heroic novelist, imagining conversations of great scientists from the seventeenth century through the 1920s. The optimism of the promise of science echoes through his depictions and a style that echoes the verve and language of fiction writers and journalists of his time.

Paul De Kruif, The Sweeping Wind (1962). De Kruif’s style has mellowed somewhat in his autobiography, but his passion for his work and the people in his life remains clear. The Sweeping Wind is of particular interest for this course because of his account of his collaboration with Sinclair Lews on Arrowsmith. Accounts of De Kruif’s own early career and his portrait of his second wife, Rhea, seem to have direct counterparts in Lewis’s novel.

Suggested readings on Arrowsmith:

Charles Rosenberg, “Martin Arrowsmith: The Scientist as Hero,” in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 123-131, notes 278-281.

William C. Summers, "On the Origins of the Science in Arrowsmith: Paul de Kruif, Felix d'Herelle and Phage," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 46 (1991): 315-332.

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