A 1920s best-seller about risky campus capitalism and early phage therapy still resonates today. Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith was a best-seller in 1925. It is a stinging satire of the US medical system from an era when quacks and their dubious cure-alls abounded — before the advent of antibiotics, double-blind trials and the Food and Drug Administration. More than 80 years on, the problems of medical practice and research — as explored in the story of central character Martin Arrowsmith's capricious career from medical school to a top-notch research institute — are remarkably relevant. For example, as a young country doctor in North Dakota, Arrowsmith deals with the kind of militant anti-vaccinationists that recently caused child immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella to plummet in the United Kingdom and in Switzerland, which is currently witnessing a measles epidemic. Indeed, one of the recurring themes of Arrowsmith is the difficulty that researchers have in communicating to the public.