Miracle Man

Miracle Man Morrison heard a Voice, and the medical world was startled. Who could try to imagine a doctor who never made a mistake! 


excerpt

The dining car rocked slightly as it sped over the middle western plains. This easy motion helped to settle the brown-eyed, aesthetic young man's dinner. Philip Morrison was indeed aesthetic, but he was not an artist. He was a surgeon. He was still wearing the uniform of a Major of the United States Army Medical Corps. In his mind's eye, he could feel the sharp softness of the tweed suit he would soon wear, hear the soft voice of Kit, his wife, and feel the firm hand grip of Dr. Ezra Potter, congratulating him. Ah, life was good! The voice of an immaculate waiter intruded gently on his musing. 


"Will theah be anything else, sah?" 


"I could use a little more of this excellent coffee," Philip grinned. 


The beaming, dusky waiter returned in a moment with a gleaming, silver pot 

of coffee. 


Surrounded by the luxury of the streamlined dining car, memories of four years in the south Pacific weren't nearly so painful. Philip remembered the shocking transition from the Port of Embarcation and the more or less peaceful cruise to the flaming, banging, mud-soaked hell of his tiny medical unit, so close to the lines that he could occasionally hear the chatter of enemy officers giving commands. The dreary, endless days and nights, punctuated by explosions, curses and screams, gradually made his mind sink into a plodding, thoughtless, gray monotony. His staff around him changed many times, but he had been left as though forgotten. Each day took him a few miles closer to Tokyo, but each mile robbed such terms as liberty, victory and home of any meaning. But one day, it all changed. The surroundings were the same; he was the same man, doing the same job. But there was someone else there, someone nobody could see and only Philip could hear: The Voice. The unexplainable Voice! At first, it came only occasionally when Philip's mind would falter and his fingers would hesitate in the path of saving lives. 

The Voice would speak issuing terse directives, showing his benumbed fingers the way. 


As time passed, The Voice became more familiar; it was there at every surgery, an invisible, invaluable consultant. To Philip, it was all very strange, but in such circumstances men's minds do not question too deeply, do not philosophize. 


Back in the United States, out of the maze of quadruplicate forms, one fact became evident to 'the powers that be.' Somewhere in the war torn Pacific theater was a young surgeon, only a captain, whose percentage of cures was nothing short of miraculous. And so it was that shortly before the end of the war, Captain Philip Morrison was brought back and after three days rest at the Port of Debarcation, was transferred to the staff of one of  the largest Army General Hospitals. 


As Phillip began to treat returning veterans, he took no notice of the unusual interest taken in his work by the other physicians. Now that he had time to rest and think, he was primarily concerned with The Voice. The first explanation that occurred to him was that his mind was deranged. Yet 

this explanation was unsatisfactory because The Voice told him things that he, himself, could not know. It told him of conditions existing in his patients that were unsuspected and The Voice was invariably right. The Voice had never spoken to him directly, but had only whispered, like a person making comments at a play.