싱클레어 루이스의『애로우스미스』와치유의 공간

Abstract

Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith is a book which is often recommended as the medical ethics text for training the premedical and medical students because the hero Martin Arrowsmith shows the pursuit of the noble ideals of medical research for the benefit of mankind and of selfless devotion to the care of patients. However, Arrowsmith’s cases are not always successful in terms of the holistic doctor model. His medical ethics is often disturbed by his ambition to become “the men of measured merriments” or the others’ medical commercialism. Moreover, Arrowsmith often cynically resists the temptation of secular success by following the isolated and antisocial research model for the fundamental and ideal scientism. In this regard, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith is rather close to the book which shows the difficulty of the science and society’s coexistence in medical profession. Sinclair Lewis’s biographical elements reveal the author’s connection with medicine, his romantic recalcitration and his strong religious tendency. In his book, Sinclair Lewis applies his romantic selfless dedication to science and makes science the godly ideal Science to resist the societal influence to corrupt the pure science. Martin Arrowsmith’s ending in the woods for the lonely ideal research is the proof of his selfless yet anti-holistic attitudes toward curing patients and their diseases. The illness, however, as the holistic conception of the disease, is scatteredly described as the clearing and healing space in Lewis Sinclair’s fiction like Arrowsmith’s anti-imperialistic and meditative attitudes toward the natives. Also, the extreme conflicts between society and science revealed in the fiction effectively makes The Arrowsmith the space of healing where the individual garden place of peace in mind and brain, almost like the religious meditation, is as important as the holistic treatment which harmonizes science with society. The solitary ending of his fiction is ironically suggestive in this regard.