Chapter 1

THE EPISODE OF THE PATIENT WHO DISAPPOINTED HER DOCTOR

Hilda Wade's gift was so unique, so extraordinary, that I must
illustrate it, I think, before I attempt to describe it. But first let
me say a word of explanation about the Master.

I have never met anyone who impressed me so much with a sense of
GREATNESS as Professor Sebastian. And this was not due to his scientific
eminence alone: the man's strength and keenness struck me quite as
forcibly as his vast attainments. When he first came to St. Nathaniel's
Hospital, an eager, fiery-eyed physiologist, well past the prime of
life, and began to preach with all the electric force of his vivid
personality that the one thing on earth worth a young man's doing was
to work in his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be
a scientific doctor, dozens of us were infected by his contagious
enthusiasm. He proclaimed the gospel of germs; and the germ of his own
zeal flew abroad in the hospital: it ran through the wards as if it were
typhoid fever. Within a few months, half the students were converted
from lukewarm observers of medical routine into flaming apostles of the
new methods.

The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley
was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of
medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous
analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall,
thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he
represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute
self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious
abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for
life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled
in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping
shoulders. His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry
grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set,
hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features. In some
respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau's: in
others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great
predecessor, Professor Owen. Wherever he went, men turned to stare at
him. In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in
Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary. And they were not
far wrong--in essence; for Sebastian's stern, sharp face was above all
things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering
pursuit in life--the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up
his entire nature.

He WAS what he looked--the most single-minded person I have ever come
across. And when I say