In the novel, Lewis seems to be satirizing the Rockefeller Institute - by using the fictional name of the McGurk Institute. "At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new McGurk building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide" (Lewis, p. 320). In this passage he pans the institute by bringing it down to the level of "all halls" (any building anywhere) and then adds that the building is "smirkingly new" (suggesting a stuffy, cryptic, sneering building reflecting the phony people inside). Moreover, Lewis is satirizing the commercialization of American medicine. And he satirizes scientists themselves. "It is strange that excellent bacteriologists and chemists should scramble eggs to waterily, should make such bitter coffee and be so casual about dirty spoons," Lewis writes on page 323.

His protagonist, Martin, is - for a time - something of a hero for his noble morality and idealism. While Martin certainly tries to keep his belief in the ideal scientific values he holds dear, all around him there is phoniness and a desire for power and money. But he himself becomes just like those he abhors. On page 338, Martin thinks he has made a great discovery, and says to Leora, "...think how nice it'll be to give some dinners of our own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I'm a department head. But when Gottlieb arrives and tells Martin that Martin has not, after all, been the discoverer of "the X Principle," that someone else has already made that discovery, Martin laments: "Then I'm not going to be a department-head or famous...

I'm back in the gutter." The light "of creation faded to dirty gray," Lewis writes on page 338.
Martin is indeed thought of as a hero on the island of St. Hubert, where citizens are dying from the plague and are also being repressed by the British Colonial rule of the island.

But in fact Martin's own seeming humanitarian efforts to test the effectiveness of his new vaccine (to fight the plague) becomes part of the satire, because while it seems a great quest to save an island, on the other hand by using all those people of color in an attempt to perfect a vaccine in fact Martin is using them as guinea pigs. He is exploiting them in the name of science, so even the best and brightest in his novel are satirized.

Another institution satirized in Arrowsmith that is clearly deserving of a satirical attack is colonialism. The island where Martin is testing his vaccine has seen many deaths, and those deaths have been concealed by the British colonial administration on the island. In a very real way, the island is dying not just of the plague, but also from the oppressive regime controlling it. The character Dr. Inchcape Jones is the classic foil used by Lewis to satirize the British official who has a totally unrealistic view of the natives on the island he governs. Jones is also used by Lewis to satirize a wholly absurd view of science and medicine. For example, Jones equates leprosy as a punishment for native races that is not only racist, it is ignorant.

Works Cited

Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945.