TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 149
wed Holmes's more-than-human intelligence to state-of-the-art medical
technology. In this format, medical Sherlocks achieved a first bout of
popularity in the 1920s, witnessed by Lewis's novelArrowsmith(1925)
and de Kruif's bestsellerTheMicrobeHunters(1926). Two generations
later, the term and the figure for which it stands, attained high profile
during the HIV-AIDS crisis. In this latter context, journalist Walter
Isaacson spoke approvingly of "America's disease detectives, whose
special calling it is to track invisible killers.. ." (qtd. in Wald,
Contagious226).
America's archetypal disease detective is, in all likelihood, Walter
Reed, credited with having discovered the etiology of yellow fever. I
have briefly dwelt on the story of this iconic historical figure above in
the segment on the Reed Yellow Fever Commission. Reed is the avatar
of many fictional and filmic figures, many of them pop-cultural. By
most accounts, however, historically the first exemplar of the medical
Sherlock in U.S. culture was Martin Arrowsmith in Sinclair Lewis's
1925 novel by that title. Actually, there are two such Sherlocks in this
prototypical"medicalnovel"(Summers315),arrangedinagenerational
pattern, as teacher-student/father-son relationship: Max Gottlieb, author
ofthefirstauthoritativebookonimmunologyandprofessoratthesmall
mid-Western medical school, and his student Arrowsmith who gets
inducted there into the arcana of bio-medical research. In this
generational framework, it is the older man, Gottlieb, who is explicitly
identified as a medical Sherlock—"Gottlieb would have made an
excellent Sherlock Holmes" (133)—leaving space for his sponsored
godchildtofigureasanewtypeofnolongerheroicbutinstitution-based
researcher.^95 This true-born American boy soon recognizes there is
something more-than-human, almost spiritual about bio-medical truth-
finding:"hisjustbeinginalabisaprayer,"is"ecstasy"(31,38).Inthe
elaborate detail of a biomedical Bildungsroman (Löwy 418), this
biography of a "seeker," as the often intrusive narrative voice puts it
(^95) This process is of course part of the ongoing medicalization of U.S. culture
and society which was taking place at the time in which the novel is set. This
process has been well described by Clarke et al., "Charting (Bio)medicine and
(Bio)medicalization"88-103. For a reading of the novel in this context cf.
Markel,esp."Reflections"372-75.