Arrowsmith Goes Native: Medicine and Empire in Fiction and Film

Abstract

This essay examines how evolving perceptions of America's role as a world power in the interwar period affect representations of medical research and practice. It argues that Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith, and the film based on that novel, construct imperial role for the United States in their depictions of American scientific medicine. In recent years, scholars of American literature and culture have applied insights from the study of European colonial discourse to their analyses of American texts written during the heyday of empire. As Amy Kaplan notes in her introduction to the anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, this investigation of the project of American empire seeks to correct the tendency to treat American expansionism as an entirely separate phenomenon from European colonization of the nineteenth century rather than interrelated form of imperial expansion (11). In a similar vein, historians of American medicine have begun to identify the influence of the racial ideologies of nineteenth-century European tropical medicine on American scientific medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Works such as Warwick Anderson's Immunities of Empire have demonstrated that the transition from climatological to germ-based understandings of disease in American medicine did not change the imperial role played by medical researchers in tropical countries: in fact, new understandings of disease transmission resulted in calls for greater intervention into the lives of colonial subjects. Both these recent fields of postcolonial inquiry have begun to have effect on the study of the relationship between medicine and American literature, enabling new understandings of how American literature engages the vexed dynamic between medicine and empire. There has, however, been little examination of colonial rhetoric in perhaps the most well-known work of American literature focussed on medicine, Sinclair Lewis's 1925 novel, Arrowsmith. In what is clearly the most dramatic portion of the novel, Martin Arrowsmith journeys to the fictional West Indian island of St. Hubert to test the effectiveness of his newly developed plague vaccine. Martin succeeds in establishing a controlled experiment, but a series of events--including the death of Martin's wife from plague--lead him to sabotage his own work. By focussing on the collapse of Martin's greatest scientific project, the St. Hubert chapters of Arrowsmith call into question the novel's otherwise unflappable faith in scientific medicine, thus compromisi ng what medical historian Charles Rosenberg has described as the moral (47) of the novel. More than that, the ruined experiment seems specifically to represent the failure of Western reason in the tropics: there is a suggestion, in Arrowsmith, that Martin Arrowsmith goes at the end of his stay in St. Hubert. In this essay, which is a reading of Lewis's Arrowsmith as well as the 1931 film based on Lewis's novel, I argue that the West Indies episodes in both texts are best understood by examining how Arrowsmith positions itself in respect to contemporary debates about the international role of American scientific medicine. I begin by considering a paradox in the structure of the Lewis's St. Hubert chapters. The novel's description of St. Hubert--blighted by British colonial rule as well as by plague--establishes Martin, a scientist and American, as the hero the island desperately needs. However, Martin does not plan to save St. Hubert; rather, he wants to perfect a vaccine for future use. When Martin's experiment is performed on the black bodies of the island's native population, the novel is unable to contain the contradictions between narrative expectations and diagetic action: in a sense, the novel collapses at the same time as does Martin. After considering the implications of this collapse for the novel, I show how the film version of Arrowsmith replaces the tension between Martin's experiment and St. …