Horace Bianchon enjoys an outstanding reputation as a physician, surgeon, and developer of a system of theoretical physiology. While pursuing his education at a medical school in Paris, he studied under the great French surgeon Desplein, acknowledged even by his enemies as an extraordinary physician and teacher. As the narrator points out,Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer and his malady by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine the very time, the hour, the minute when an operation should be performed, making due allowance for atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual temperament........But if Desplein had a godlike eye, there was nothing of the divine in his soul, for he was an atheist.