David Campbell is a young houseman - a junior doctor - at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. Working long hours and at the beck and call of his somewhat slapdash superiors and numerous patients, he finds some respite from all that in drink and sexual escapades with some of the nurses on the wards. He is particularly attracted to Nurse Joan Wasson, but is also prey to other predatory nurses and sisters, especially when Joan later falls ill with appendicitis and is hospitalized. Learning on the wards through trial and error, he also finds himself having to deal with his superior Dr Henry Creech's mistake when a noted poet, Hamish Quothquan, is rushed in with stomach pains by his granddaughter Alison from a misdiagnosis. But worse is to come when an outbreak of hepatitis hits the hospital and claims the lives of some of the patients. As staff try to work out how it is spreading, not even the doctors or staff are safe from it's deadly infection.
Dr Bob Souter slowly begins to recover from his infection with hepatitis, but others have not been so lucky. David continues to work as a houseman and underling for his superiors, working now under the eccentric charges of Alester Ravelston-Orr and John Lockhead. He is often thrown in at the deep end, performing surgery at one time on a woman with gangrene on an operation his superior should be doing that does not go to plan. By chance he bumps into Alison Quothquan, the granddaughter of the poet who died due to a top surgeon's misdiagnosis, and it soon develops into a tentative relationship. But all the while hepatitis continues to spread through the hospital and when a reporter, Phil Duffy, hears of the hospital's attempts to cover it up, he decides to expose the scandal. As yet more staff begin to fall ill, including David himself, he comes to a shocking conclusion as to the cause of it's infection.
