To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his help in the planning of the fable itself⁠—for his realization of the...

The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela⁠—the girl herself had heaped with torn so...

The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela⁠—the girl herself had heaped with torn so...

Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was reading Gray’s Anatomy. His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac. There was a suspicion in Elk Mi...

The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin would not have to help him into bed. But it was a bad sign tha...

The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its ...

The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its ...

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was already brisk. Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pa...

On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhil...

Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, ...

In college Martin had been a “barb”⁠—he had not belonged to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been “rushed,” but he had resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men from the larger cities....

Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room...

John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in the University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whis...

John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in the University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whis...

In Dr. Stout’s anatomy lectures there were no disturbances, but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest of them was the insertion of a firecracker in the cadaver on which the two vi...

When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here, listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat-eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfaff or Irving Watter...

It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline Fox. Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opinionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was staying on, ostensib...

At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book; geniuses for det...

Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging. During the strain of study f...

Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s howling conversation, Clif’s fondness for dropping things in people’s soup, and Clif...

Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous. They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and plat...

Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous. They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and plat...

As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam, “Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjo...

The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On the demonstrator’s tab...

There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of creation. He woke ear...

Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of the University that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius. Clif ...

Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of the University that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius. Clif ...

Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not complete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do? They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the University Dramatic Society p...

It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every ob...

Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the Zenith Advocate-Times⁠—Madeline leaped into an orgy of joc...

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, artis...

He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope y...

For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn someth...

The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances⁠—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls aw...

The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances⁠—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls aw...

His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise th...

Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The bored reception clerk⁠—who was interested only in obtaining...

He had promised to see Madeline the next morning. By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not bring i...

His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were...

The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s l...

The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s l...

Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the symbo...

For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long. In ...

It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it kept ...

As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably w...

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the ...

And always Martin’s work went on⁠—assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations⁠—sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional ...

And always Martin’s work went on⁠—assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations⁠—sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional ...

There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather shrill. He had no uplifted moments when he saw himself in relation to th...

Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home to Dakota, perhaps for months, on the ground that her mother was unwell, and he had...

January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large lack...

The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous ...

The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous ...

A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed worth doing. In that listless state he was mooning about the laboratory durin...

He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He changed trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin lines of fence-wire. He felt free, in release from the little fields...

Dean Silva’s secretary looked up delightedly, she hearkened with anticipation. But Martin said meekly, “Please, could I see the dean?” and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson...

Dean Silva’s secretary looked up delightedly, she hearkened with anticipation. But Martin said meekly, “Please, could I see the dean?” and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson...

Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of nursing for over-absence and for being married. She suspected that it was her father who had informed the hospital authorities. Then, it appear...

He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been; a square white and blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise chairs...

Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administration and Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and quite reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and such sons of ...

There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior years. Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in Mohalis all summer. The year and a half from his marriage to his graduation was...

None of the hectic activities of Senior year⁠—neurology and pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories in the hospitals, attendance on operations, dressing wounds, learning not...

The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal bells of charging fire-apparatus. Miles of small woode...

The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal bells of charging fire-apparatus. Miles of small woode...

The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic with photographs and ties and undarned socks. They spent hou...

At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined. Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested i...

At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined. Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested i...

Max Gottlieb’s wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty she had not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-town bourgeois, who pay their debts and overeat and grow red...

There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his learning as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the few was Martin Arrowsmith. However harshly he may have pointe...

It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superst...

No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunzike...

No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunzike...

Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a religious-seeming custom. Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very much like prayer, though certainly there was ...

In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories as he had never planned, and instead of student assistants he had an expert who himself had taught bacteriology, as well as three swif...

Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged. She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been proud of...

All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze...

All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze...

To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussion brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-finding was the only thing the Tozers mentioned. They went thoroughly into...

With none of the profane observations on “medical peddlers” which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handso...

With none of the profane observations on “medical peddlers” which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handso...

This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steel stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-enam...

He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strong tenotome, the delicate curved needles. With them was a...

With his first admirers he developed his first enemies. When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is difficult not to meet everyone on the street every day), they glared. Then he...

So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were awaiting a love message. A hoarse and shaky voice: “I w...

The child was still alive when he came brusquely into the house. All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted “Thank God!” and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarra...

When he had practiced medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a sw...

When he had practiced medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a sw...

So did Martin stumble into respectability. In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheats...

He had intimates⁠—the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the garageman⁠—to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It w...

Gustaf Sondelius was back in America. In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and eccentric, and neither ...

Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything he had missed. “He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they sat on the porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all t...

Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and deplorable as to varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed and b...

Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and deplorable as to varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed and b...

Bert Tozer wailed, “Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around saying you were a booze-hoister and so on.” “Did he? People do sort of keep an eye on one ...

There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County. The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been injected, but the disease spread. Martin heard the farmers wailing. ...

The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the hours of slow riding. He drowsed and smoked and meditated. “I’m going to forg...

In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkil...

Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and...

Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and...

He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondeli...

Bert Tozer said: “You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all tha...

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle ...

Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle ...

Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the Department of Public Health. The department was on an alley, in a s...

When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora ...

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old-Fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather man...

Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was eager to have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the visitin...

Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was eager to have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the visitin...

Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into many of the associations, clubs, lodges, and “causes” with which Nautilus foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hik...

He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laborator...

Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks among the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them drove out in a bobsled filled with straw and blue woolly robes. The sleigh bells...

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 P...

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 P...

Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babi...

A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory. He was summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to angry citizens why the garage next door to them should smell of gasol...

The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks,...

This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an un...

This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an un...

While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as a tyrant and a radical. There was no more sanitary and efficient ...

Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company. He had heard that Tre...

There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps twelve families in the Ashford Grove section who, though they went to the cou...

Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work is very satisfactory. There’s only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting...

It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable...

It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable...

His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in his training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor, county judge. But the Democratic slogan, “Pickerbaugh the Pickup Candidate,”...

Over the Nautilus Cornfield’s announcement was the vigorous headline: Almus Pickerbaugh Wins First Scientist Ever Elected to Congress Sidekick of Darwin and Pasteur Gives New Punch to Steering Ship of...

The day of Pickerbaugh’s leaving for Washington was made a fiesta. At the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of Commerce gave to everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies, doughnuts, and coffee, ...

It cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for organization, but under him the Department of Public Health changed completely. He chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ockford, a lively youngst...

It cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for organization, but under him the Department of Public Health changed completely. He chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ockford, a lively youngst...

Mrs. McCandless had once been a “hired girl”; then nurse, then confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless, wholesale grocer and owner of real estate. When he died she inherited everything. Th...

Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced, “Fine! I’m going to back you up in everything the D.P.H. does.” Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold’s set were somewhat exig...

He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they we...

When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked out, that’s what happened.” One of the papers had an innocent squib: Probably a certai...

As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud: “I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but making money. ...

Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and b...

Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and b...

While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of Wheatsylvania to mature man, his relations to Leora developed from loyal boy-and-girl adventurousness to lasting solidity. They had that understa...

After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose knots of his streptolysin research. When Angus Duer discovered it he h...

The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of the world. Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint ...

The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of the world. Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint ...

Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was to be his⁠—smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right height, a proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed the door and let his...

He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the Thirties, and all the way the crowds stared at him⁠—this slim, pale, black-eyed, beaming young man who thrust among them, half-running, se...

The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor any sort of magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the Institute, a favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of laundries ...

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after their coming. As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s af...

His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, “What are you doing here? You’re the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!” He had isolated twe...

His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, “What are you doing here? You’re the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!” He had isolated twe...

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. Martin may not have learned much in the...

The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the Lon...

Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of t...

For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den opening from his laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sar...

Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to the War Department. All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who declined to be so honored, were made offic...

Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, ha...

The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs’s luncheon lectures on “the part America will inevitably play i...

Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn thing in this whole year at McGurk. St...

Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn thing in this whole year at McGurk. St...

For a week Martin’s life had all the regularity of an escaped soldier in the enemy’s country, with the same agitation and the same desire to prowl at night. He was always sterilizing flasks, preparing...

As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With consid...

When the work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks, the Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and they hinted to Martin that he needed their several assistances. He avoided t...

When the work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks, the Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and they hinted to Martin that he needed their several assistances. He avoided t...

For a year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage ex...

For a year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage ex...

Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Martin, and the biophysics assistant, research was halted. There was a surging of factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of scientists who des...

To the dinner in Gottlieb’s honor (the only dinner that ever was given in Gottlieb’s honor) there came not only the men of impressive but easy affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but the few scie...

Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epidemiologist, the Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier. Gottlieb explained to Mar...

After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had gone on to bubonic plague, to the possibilities of preventing it and curing it wit...

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled m...

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled m...

To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the rather dull and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and restaurant called the Ice House. It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping ...

No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the Negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing,...

There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have been mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science ...

There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have been mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science ...

Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy making phage and receiving unsolicited advice from all the Institute staff to t...

The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that Sondelius take his first injection of phage. He refused. “No, I will not touch it till you get converted to humanity, Martin, and give it to ...

The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the day before the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones declared that the island was quarantined. People might come in, but no one could ...

Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for injection, Martin made personal preparations for the tropics. He bought, in seventeen minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two new shirts, and, as St. Hub...

They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on a winter morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamer St. Buryan of the McGurk Line, which carried machinery and flour and codfish and motors to the...

As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck. Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and t...

As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter of course. He pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily de...

He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping. He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot a...

Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market ...

Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market ...

They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by afternoon. It was late night, with most of the passengers asleep, when they arrived at Blackwater. As Martin came out on the damp and vacant dec...

A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a Negress who, before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door. Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk dressing-gown. If e...

In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford, whose familiarity made it the more grotesque in this creepy world, and took them to Penrith Lodge, on the cool hills behind Blackwater. They trave...

With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants and the cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge lay high on a crest, looking across the ugly flat of the town to the wash of sea. A...

While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones’s administration, which proved to be almost anything that could be wrong. A plague ...

To persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a test in which half of them might die, so that all plague might⁠—perhaps⁠—be ended forever, was impossible. Martin argued with Inchcape Jones...

To persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a test in which half of them might die, so that all plague might⁠—perhaps⁠—be ended forever, was impossible. Martin argued with Inchcape Jones...

Though Government House was officially the chief residence of St. Hubert, it was but a thatched bungalow a little larger than Martin’s own Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt more easy, and he ...

Thanks to Sondelius’s crafty bullying, Martin was able to present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor, the temporarily suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones, several hearty member...

One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third man was down with plague and one doctor to attend them all, he now gave phage to the entire village; a long strain of injections, not improved b...

Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist Inchcape Jones’s demand that he give the phage to everyone, still do what he had be...

Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed Surgeon General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal assignment of Martin to St. Swithin’s Parish, as medical officer with complete pow...

In St. Swithin’s Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken cane-fields. Here Cecil Twyford, that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre and interpreted ...

The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the popula...

The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the popula...

In the evening, while they returned by Twyford’s rattling little motor to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Martin as one who had shared his work, but when she had bathed and powdered and dresse...

The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge⁠—the port-doctor had cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a neighbor. The ...

When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so little apart since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital room in Zeni...

Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage to everybody. “I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not ...

The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the island; everybody from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was out shooting rats and ground squirrels. Whether from phage or rat-killing or Provide...

Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford to his own first precise figures. As the giver of phage to some thousands of fr...

He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon. The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While Sir Robert ruddily blurted...

It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on the St. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the bridge. And on the St. Buryan wa...

It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on the St. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the bridge. And on the St. Buryan wa...

With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely Sou...

Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs. As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. A...

At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indignation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs. Dawson, Martin was greeted by reporters who agreeably though vaguely desired to kn...

When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped up to shake hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flustering, there is no time at which one can stomach so much of it as at homecomin...

The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gottlieb’s flat, had spoken to Miriam and received permission to call in the late afternoon. All the way uptown he could hear Gottlieb saying, “You we...

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: the frock she had bought for C...

Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear from her again. His absorption in osmotic pressure de...

Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear from her again. His absorption in osmotic pressure de...

Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger’s fast-motoring set. She let the lady Maecenases of her acqu...

What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at a...

For three months they wandered in Europe. On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly money thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I’ve put ten thousand dollars t...

They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (...

Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora, who, in her indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fam...

Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on t...

Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on t...

They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly, and they demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand dollars for monkeys. They wished to start a research which might take two year...

Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had not quite planned, but...

With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional socia...

With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional socia...

It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grandfathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Bidefor...

For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making diagrams with his thumbnail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt...

Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce section of Joyce’s set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an exhausted world⁠—going out to Martin’s laboratory and watching him ...

R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away from the Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife: “I don’t mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks you’re a chump, but I do ...

Joyce’s busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it was hard to ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble butler, and two nurses for the baby. But she often said that she was never a...

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls, and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin wit...

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls, and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin wit...

He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hou...

They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size...

On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States. “When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we shall see you a cabin...