HILDA WADE



CHAPTER I

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