It introduces readers to the life and social work of the young doctor Tomasz Judym, as well as his love of Joanna Podborska.

With it, the writer started a new type of contemporary novel, grounded in the realities of Polish life at the end of the 19th century, that was subordinated to the main idea, social work.

It constitutes the effect of his cognitive passion and positive views that writing must be joined with an honest, even scientific, penetration of social reality and one's own beliefs.

Tomasz Judym is a young, ambitious surgeon who thinks that his mission as a doctor is to help people harmed by chance and wants to improve the living and working conditions of the most deprived.

Judym believes that if he is happy, fulfilled when it comes to love and starts a family, he will soon become an egoist and insensitive to people's suffering.

However, Żeromski's hero also has the features of a positivistic social man: the desire to devote himself to others, altruism and the idea of organic work.

"Because of his dilemma Tomasz Judym is a tragic hero - he has to choose between his own happiness and the obligation he feels to pay his debt to a society.

She lost her parents early in life and not only works to maintain herself, but also her two brothers (one of whom died in Irkutsk, the other studies in Switzerland).

This shows that she is an intelligent woman maintaining her younger siblings, she is largely self-educated, she is constantly reading and learning and she is interested in theatre and literature.