Doctor Erica Werner

Erika Werner is a gifted young surgical assistant whose talent and devotion are matched only by her capacity for self-sacrifice. When she falls into a sudden, consuming love affair with the celebrated Professor Bornholm, she gives herself entirely to her feelings, while the ambitious senior surgeon keeps his sights fixed on the glory and fortune his career might bring. Their imbalance turns tragic when Bornholm commits a fatal professional error in the operating theatre. To shield the man she loves, Erika takes the blame upon herself and accepts imprisonment, and it is in the bleakness of her cell that she finally begins to see the careerism and cowardice of the lover she sacrificed everything to protect. Set against the high-pressure world of a German clinic, the novel follows the human cost of misplaced trust and the slow, painful disillusionment of a woman who learns too late what her devotion was worth. A melodramatic medical romance from one of postwar Germany's most popular storytellers, it pairs hospital tension with a study of love curdled by ambition.