Boy grows up to become a successful doctor at the expense of family relationships.
A brilliant young doctor grows away from his family and his community when his older brother convinces him to make his fortune as a Park Avenue doctor. He spends his time prescribing placebos to people who are not sick leaving no time for his clinic and his passion of genuine healing. When tragedy strikes, he sees where his obligations lie, but will it be too late?—Sister Grimm <[email protected]>
As a boy in the Jewish ghetto of New York, Felix "Felixel" Klauber (Ricardo Cortez), a brilliant young man from a tight-knit Jewish family, dreams of becoming a surgeon, while his materialistic older brother Magnus (Noel Madison) devises ways to make quick money. After many years of study, Felix earns his medical degree and becomes a physician in the local clinic, where his unorthodox but successful methods earn him the respect of both his patients and his peers. Magnus, however, convinces Felix's mother Hannah (Anna Appel) that Felix should quit the clinic and open a lucrative private medical practice on the Upper West Side to better provide for the family, which includes Felix's aging father Meyer (Gregory Ratoff) and his unmarried sister Birdie (Lita Chevret).
Although troubled by Magnus' plan, Hannah uses her maternal influence and talks Felix into changing his practice. Soon Felix moves to Park Avenue and establishes himself as the doctor "with the million-dollar hands," whose patients' complaints are more imaginary than real, after working his way up from being a doctor at a Lower East Side clinic.Felix's success causes him to become estranged from both his family and the community back in the old neighborhood, and ignores Jessica (Irene Dunne), his crippled childhood sweetheart who has been disabled with a spine malady since she was young girl. She teaches at the Braille Institute for the Blind. When Felix fails to show up to perform a lifesaving operation on one of her impoverished blind students, Jessica denounces him as a traitor to his heritage and to his profession. Humbled and confused, Felix attends the "Redemption of the First Born" ceremony given in his baby nephew's honor and witnesses the sudden collapse of his father. At his family's urging, Felix agrees to perform surgery on his father, who has an advanced brain tumor, and is mortified when he dies on the table. Devastated by his father's death, he turns away from surgery and his gift of healing, concentrating on catering to well-heeled hypochondriacs, falling into a deep depression.
Devastated by his father's death, Felix vows never to practice medicine again and falls into a deep depression. However, when Jessica, whose spinal condition has worsened, announces that she is going to take a chance on a dangerous operation that may end her lameness, Felix offers his services and perfectly executes the operation. His confidence restored, Felix returns to medicine and to his ghetto roots.
