'But I just killed someone!'
'I don't know if I'd shout about it if I were you.' Malcolm Goldblatt paused. 'Look, you didn't kill him. It was waiting to happen. You just . . . helped.'
'Malcolm, they'll strike me off!' 'They can't strike you off. You're still a House Officer. They haven't struck you on yet . . . '

Malcolm Goldblatt has one last chance. Life, or his own obstinacy, has dumped him at the door of Professor Andrea Small's medical unit, where he will have the privilege of ministering to the world's most unimportant disease. But in so many ways, this unit is like all the others that Goldblatt has worked on, from Dr. Madic's ferocious aversion to work, to Dr. Burton's knife-in-the-back ambition, right up to the monstrous vanities of the professor herself--and that's before he even meets the patients. Soon the familiar cycle of hope and despair threatens to drag him into its eddy, and with his finger never far from the self-destruct button, the temptation to press it for what will surely be the final time begins to feel less like professional suicide and more like salvation.