Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [116]
Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.
It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take much share in his publicity campaigns, but rather to be his substitute in the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.
Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What if my statistics aren’t always exact? W’hat if my advertising, my jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it’s all on the right side. No matter what methods we use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re justified.”
To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really matter? Does truth matter — clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?
“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the desire for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man’s excitement about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick by Pickerbaugh.”
To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.
He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone, every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent chance of dying before the age of sixteen and he could not startle with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir, SAVED, by a daily cold shower?”
For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.
To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,” was without significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to him inconceivable
“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every enlightened man in the public service KNOWS enough about the causes of disease — matter now of acting on that knowledge.”
When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets about the real danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his leaders.
He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven practical value” of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh’s biology. He noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had surged up demanding