Young Dr Kildare

Plot

After graduating from medical school, Dr. James Kildare (Lew Ayres) returns to his small home town, where his proud parents Stephen (Samuel S. Hinds) and Martha Kildare (Emma Dunn) and childhood friend Alice Raymond (Lynne Carver) expect him to join his father in his medical practice. However, he is more ambitious, though he is unsure what he wants to do. He has accepted a job as an intern at Blair General, a large New York City hospital.

He and the other new interns are being greeted by the hospital's administrator, Dr. Carew (Walter Kingsford), when the famous wheelchair-bound diagnostician Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore) bursts in and sizes up the newcomers. When Gillespie demands that the interns diagnose him on the spot, only Kildare takes up his challenge, prognosticating that he has a melanoma on his hand and a year to live. When Kildare hedges before Gillespie's gruff, Gillespie dismisses interest in him.

Later, Kildare is assigned ambulance duty with attendant Joe Wayman (Nat Pendleton). His first call is a man who has passed out in a bar. Discarding the obvious conclusion of drunkenness, Kildare suspects the man has a serious medical problem. When Kildare has to respond to a second, more urgent call, he orders the skeptical Wayman to give the man oxygen all the way to the hospital. Wayman disregards his order and the man dies as a result. Kildare later takes the blame rather than have Wayman lose his job.

Kildare then attends to Barbara Chanler (Jo Ann Sayers), a young suicide victim. Despite finding no signs of life, Kildare refuses to give up and finally succeeds in reviving her. Barbara Chanler turns out to be the sole child and heiress of extremely wealthy Robert Chanler (Pierre Watkin). Highly respected psychiatrist Dr. Lane-Porteus (Monty Woolley) diagnoses schizophrenia. Kildare, based on a short conversation he had with Barbara, is sure that she was driven to attempt suicide for more ordinary reasons. However, when Kildare refuses to divulge what she told him in strictest confidence, Carew suspends him.

From a chance comment by Barbara's concerned fiance, Jack Hamilton (Truman Bradley), Kildare is able to piece the clues together. After quarreling with Hamilton, Barbara had gone to a nightclub alone, where she had started drinking heavily. A man took her upstairs to a private room, and that's all she remembered of the night. She was found by a policeman wandering the streets and taken home. Fear of what might have happened during her blackout made her try to take her own life.

When Kildare goes to Gillespie for advice, the older man broadly hints that he should ignore hospital rules. Kildare sneaks in to see Barbara to reassure her that nothing disgraceful happened. The man at the nightclub had recognized her and, fearful of what her rich father would do if he took advantage of her condition, he had simply dumped her on the street. Kildare then coaches Barbara on how to act so that Lane-Porteus does not have her confined to a mental institution.

Unaware of these developments, the hospital board fires Kildare for insubordination. He tells his parents and Alice, who have come to see him, that he is ready to become his father's partner. However, Gillespie has other ideas. All along, he had been testing Kildare. Now that he is sure of Kildare's integrity, competence and most of all courage of convictions, Gillespie hires the young man as his assistant, to pass along as much as possible before he dies of what Kildare had correctly diagnosed.

Cast