Immunology and literature in the early twentieth century: "Arrowsmith" and "The Doctor's Dilemma".

Scientific research is at the centre of two important literary works published in the early twentieth century: George Bernard Shaw's play The doctor's dilemma (1906), and Sinclair Lewis's novel, Arrowsmith (1925). Both deal with medical science, and in both the hero is an immunologist (or, in the terminology of the period, a specialist in the science of immunity). But the images of immunology in Shaw's play and in Lewis's book are very different. Moreover, the same real-life scientist, the flamboyant Sir Almroth Wright and the same immunological theory, Wright's opsonin theory, appear in both works, but in diametrically opposed roles. Wright is the barely disguised prototype of Shaw's hero, the scientist Sir Colenso Ridgeon, and Shaw represents the opsonin theory as the most advanced form ofscientific knowledge. The name ofWright is seldom mentioned explicitly in Arrowsmith but his opsonin theory is the incarnation ofthe false theories ofimmunity fought by Max Gottlieb, the exemplary scientist in the novel. Why was the young science ofimmunology honoured by placement at the centre oftwo major literary works? Why was the study ofimmunity the right occupation for a literary hero in the early twentieth century? And what is the basis ofthe differences in Shaw's and Lewis's presentations of this discipline, differences made explicit by their opposed evaluations ofthe same scientist and the same theory? Answering these questions can help us not only to obtain some new insights into these literary works, but also to understand the evolution ofimmunology in the context ofthe rapid but by no means unproblematic penetration of scientific ideas into early twentieth-century medicine.