Publisher's Synopsis
The play opens with Doctor Colenso Ridgeon having been recently knighted. He has seemingly developed a cure for tuberculosis. After meeting with Sir Patrick Cullen a retired physician, Ridgeon allows Jennifer Dubedat to see him, though he is reluctant and only sees her at the insistence of Emmy, his serving-woman. Upon meeting Jennifer she asks the newly knighted doctor to save her husband, Louis Dubedat of tuberculosis. He is a man, she says of great artistic genius and she believes Dr. Ridgeon is the only man that can save him. Once Ridgeon sees his drawings, and in particular one of Mrs. Dubedat. He agrees to have the young married couple come to a private dinner he's arranged with his fellow physicians to celebrate his knighthood. There, he and his colleagues will determine if Louis is a man worth saving as Ridgeon only has 10 spaces available for his cure and he cannot spare any more. At the dinner Louis and Jennifer charm each and every one of the doctors before being sent home in order that his tuberculosis does not get worse. Once Louis and Jennifer have left, Dr. Blekinsop attempts to catch them. He returns to the other, wealthier doctors having been discussing how Louis has borrowed money from them all in the same evening and they gladly gave it to him as they were quite charmed by him. Blekinsop reveals that he lent the young artist all the money he had been scraping up in order to take the train home and the young man was meant to repay him but never did. We then are introduced to Minnie Tinwell who says that Louis Dubedat is her legal husband and she has the marriage certificate to prove it. These sequential findings continue to stack up and the doctors are left with a dilemma once they discover that Dr. Blekinsop himself has tuberculosis. The dilemma for Ridgeon has become whether to save Dubedat a budding genius of an artist who appears to have little honor or Blekinsop an honorable man who is an average doctor. And, Ridgeon's judgement is clouded by the fact that he desires to marry Jennifer.