: The young doctor, having gained experience, believes that you will not surprise him with anything. A child with a tumor instead of an eye is brought to him. Upon learning that the tumor is an ordinary abscess, the doctor realizes that he will have many surprises.

The narration is on behalf of a young doctor, whose name is not mentioned in the story. The action takes place in 1918.

The young doctor worked on the N-th site for a year. During this time, he changed a lot - he matured, released his mustache and began to shave only once a week. Before arriving in this wilderness, the doctor read about an Englishman who had fallen on an uninhabited island, who sat there until hallucinations, but still shaved every day.

Impressed by the example of an unyielding Englishman, the doctor decided to shave at least every other day, but soon realized that this was impossible. As soon as he laid out his shaving tools, an urgent patient arrived. Once the doctor had to give birth with a half-shaven face.

Then they brought a boy with a broken leg, and the doctor managed to get there only in the evening. He realized that no uninhabited island can be compared with the N-site in Muryev.

There was also a case when a doctor who was about to shave was called, and he and the midwife went in the winter to a distant village to a woman in labor, the wife of a village teacher.They almost got lost in a snowstorm and did not freeze to death. Then the doctor made the second “turn on the leg” in his life. The baby was born dead, and the doctor also broke his pen, which he could not forget for a long time.

I felt defeated, overwhelmed, crushed by a cruel fate. She threw me into this wilderness and forced me to fight alone, without any support and instructions.

The doctor was comforted by the fact that he had already broken his dead baby’s arm, and his mother was still alive.

Many terrible and funny cases happened during the year. The doctor remembered for a long time the soldier who began to tear his tooth. Usually the paramedic tore the teeth in the Muryev Hospital and did it expertly, but at that time the doctor wanted to try it himself. The tooth with the hollow was so strong that the doctor broke it together with a large piece of bone.

A huge hole formed in the gum of a soldier. The doctor decided that he had broken out a part of the jaw, and suffered for a long time with remorse, until a more experienced colleague from the county town explained to him that this was not a piece of bone, but a hole in the tooth.

Now the doctor was able not only to tear his teeth. He learned to do amputations, suture hernias, open abscesses, apply gypsum, take birth of any complexity and did not get lost in the most difficult situations. Opening the outpatient book, the doctor considered that in a year he had taken 15 613 patients, 200 people had been cured in a hospital hospital, and only six died.

But all the experience gained did not help the doctor when in the morning a one-year-old boy without an eye was brought to him. Instead of his left eye, he “bulged out a yellow ball the size of a small apple.”This eerie tumor was soft and resembled a brain substance.

Confused, the doctor decided that the child had no more eyes, and that the tumor should be excised. The boy’s mother flatly refused the operation, and the doctor himself would not have decided on it. For two days he puzzled over this incident, then forgot.

A week later, a woman came to see him with the same boy, who had a completely healthy eye instead of a tumor. Under the eyelid, the doctor found a tiny scar and realized that the tumor was a huge abscess that completely obscured the eye.

The doctor no longer declared that he would not be surprised. He realized that next year will also be rich in surprises, "which means that you need to study meekly."