Sinclair Lewis has satirized medical fakes with as much gusto as Molière, that sworn enemy of all quacks. The trail was good. The charlatan of drugs and patent medicines, the chiropractors and the mind readers swarm in the United States. The medical profession is being besieged by counterfeits of all kinds. The sentimental campaigns against vivisection, the drives against vaccination are parts of the current events in America. In “Arrowsmith” Lewis avenged the common sense of the American people. Let me summarize rapidly the plot of the book. It tells how young Arrowsmith took up his medical studies in a big Western university, how he felt inspired by the teaching of his misunderstood master Gottlieb, how he married and slowly made his way in the world as a country doctor, then of his career in a drug factory where he refused to barter his professional honor, how he joined a great scientific institute, how he discovered antitoxins, how he went to fight an epidemic of plague in the West Indies where he lost his wife, how he was tempted to market his growing reputation, how he married a rich woman and how finally he escaped and gave up everything for the sake of disinterested science. I have too much respect for the memory of the great William James to drag him from his grave among the quacks, and yet, if there is a name well fitted to brand what the novelist denounces in “Arrowsmith,” it certainly is that of “pragmatism.” The truth for which Arrowsmith stands heroically to the end, is the truth “which does not pay.” “Arrowsmith” is the work of an idealist, a plea for science sought for its own sake. Such a manifesto does honor to the ideals of the new American literature.