Professor Rafał Wilczur was a successful surgeon in Poland in the early 20th century, whose wife leaves him with their small daughter for another man. Wilczur meets a man named Samuel who asks Wilczur to help him financially. The two men go to a bar and get drunk. Wilczur gets robbed and beaten up and loses his memory after hitting his head. Suffering from amnesia, he ends up in a small village, working as a farm laborer for years and is known there as Kosiba. He eventually starts healing the other villagers, and performs surgery on an injured young woman Maria. The existing doctor in the area sues Wilczur for using the doctor's surgical instruments. In court for this case, he is recognized as the missing famous surgeon by an expert witness Dobraniecki in the case, and he then begins to retain his memory. He then realizes that the young woman he saved is his daughter, and the two are reunited. He is told that his former wife died of tuberculosis shortly after leaving him, and the daughter ended up in an orphanage. Maria then marries Leszek, the son of a local nobleman.