Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of them to the same man, who afterward made improper remarks to her. She was rescued by a Y.M.C.A. secretary, who for a considerable time held her hand to calm her.

No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of Weeks.

He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week, and Stop the Spitter Week that people who lacked his vigor were heard groaning, “My health is being ruined by all this fretting over health.”

During Cleanup Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his own composition:

Germs come by stealth
And ruin health,
So listen, pard,
Just drop a card
To some man who’ll clean up your yard
And that will hit the old germs hard.

Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to the children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration for two verses. Posters admonished:

Sell your hammer and buy a horn,
But hang onto the old flyswatter.
If you don’t want disease sneaking into the Home
Then to kill the fly you gotter!

It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to them:

Just mention fly-prevention
At the good old Eagles’ convention.

This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska, and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, “Now you see the way a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it right.”

Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer, was not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious humorist on a local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly because the cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thorough satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.

With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the Program Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and Agencies.

It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:

Brother Males and Shemales:

Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2) home wid us.

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nail the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and look cute, the ladies will love you) will unlimber a coupla keynotes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.

Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s have those cards saying you’re coming.

This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:

I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was “undignified”! Can you beat it! I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!

II

Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such crusades. He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined”⁠—this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.

Martin was so alienated that he took an antisocial 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? What 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