Here is the journal which ultimately proved the motive force for The Magnificent Obsession, the journal as it was set down by Doctor Hudson himself. One feels that he must have been a real person (or that at any rate, in his fictional being he represented the personification of someone’s experience and thought). Here we learn whence came the power—the inner strength through which he built spiritual, physical and worldly success. Here we trace the various experiments which proved his own theory. And here too we follow his opinion on a world facing much of what our world is facing today. This gives the book not only the customary hypodermic that Doctor Douglas so ably administers, but a timeliness that is not to be ignored. There is no one writing today who can put more punch into a sermon—without making one conscious it is a sermon.

After the death of his young wife, a struggling brain surgeon is left with his young daughter to raise alone, and finds a new love in Nancy Ashford, a nurse at Brightwood Hospital.