Professor Bernhardi is the professor of a medical institute in Vienna known as the Elizabethinum. A patient, a young woman, is dying in one of the wards, the victim of malpractice. But her passing away will be painless. She is happy because she believes that she is on the road to recovery, that she will live to marry her beloved young man. Euphoria, the doctor calls her condition. To tell her the truth would be in his eyes criminal. She would die in anguish. Why not let her go out of the world in bliss? But a female nurse, a conscientious Roman Catholic, thinks differently. With the aid of a budding student she sends for Father Franz Reder in the near-by Church of the Holy Florian. The priest obeys the summons, anxious to shrive a sinning soul, and to send her out of the world if not to Paradise, at least to Purgatory. In the office he encounters Professor Bernhardi, who tells him politely but firmly that he won't allow his patient to be disturbed. The priest, without excitement but painfully impressed, argues that, even if there are a few moments of sorrow, the saving of the girl's immortal soul is of paramount importance. The physician shrugs his shoulders. His business is with the body, not the soul, and he continues to bar the way. The priest makes one last appeal, uselessly; but, unperceived, the nurse has slipped out, and going to the bedside of the dying woman announces the advent of the holy man. The patient screams in agony: "I am dying!" and she does die, from fright. Bernhardi is enraged, though he never loses his air of sardonic politeness. The act ends. The result of the incident, magnified by a partisan press, is serious. A great lady, an archduchess, refuses to head the list of the Elizabethinum annual charity ball. She also snubs the wife of an aristocratic doctor. The politicians make fuel for their furnace, and presently the institution finds itself facing a grave deficit, perhaps ruin, for the minister of instruction does not favour further subventions, though he is a school friend of Bernhardi; worse follows, the board of directors is split, some of its Jewish members going so far as to say that Bernhardi should not have refused the consolations of religion to the dying. Wasn't the Elizabethinum Roman Catholic, after all?