Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs's luncheon lectures on "the part America will inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe."

They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six months before had been singing Studenten Lieder at Lüchow's, was working on poison gas to be used against all singers of Lieder; and to Martin was assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily welcomed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.