The Case of Lady Sannox by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The relations between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox were / very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a / brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among / their most illustrious confreres. There was naturally, therefore, a / very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the / lady had absolutely and for ever taken the veil, and that the world / would see her no more. When, at the very tail of this rumour, there / came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of / steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one / side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs / jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as / valuable as a cap full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to / give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that / their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation.

Douglas Stone in his prime was one of the most remarkable men in / England. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have ever reached his / prime, for he was but nine-and-thirty at the time of this little / incident. Those who knew him best were aware that, famous as he was as / a surgeon, he might have succeeded with even greater rapidity in any of / a dozen lines of life. He could have cut his way to fame as a soldier, / struggled to it as an explorer, bullied for it in the courts, or built / it out of stone and iron as an engineer. He was born to be great, for / he could plan what another man dare not do, and he could do what / another man dare not plan. In surgery none could follow him. His / nerve, his judgment, his intuition, were things apart. Again and again / his knife cut away death, but grazed the very springs of life in doing / it, until his assistants were as white as the patient. His energy, his / audacity, his full-blooded self-confidence -- does not the memory of them / still linger to the south of Marylebone Road and the north of Oxford / Street?