“You Are a Dead Man”

“I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the LORD.” — Psalm 118:17 (ESV)

Taylor had moved to London to finish his medical training, living on brown bread, water, and a few apples, walking eight or nine miles a day to save money. One evening, sewing together sheets of paper to take lecture notes, he pricked the first finger of his right hand with the needle. It was nothing. He forgot about it within moments.

The next day at the hospital he was dissecting a body — and not just any body. This one had died of a fever so dangerous that everyone working on it did so with extreme care, knowing the smallest scratch could be fatal. Before the morning was over Taylor felt strangely exhausted, then violently sick, then unable to hold his pencil. By afternoon his whole right arm and side were in severe pain. He described his symptoms to the demonstrator, a skilled surgeon, who understood at once: Taylor had a cut, and this was a case of malignant fever. Taylor insisted he had no cut — then remembered the needle-prick from the night before. The surgeon examined his hand, agreed that was almost certainly the way the poison had entered, and told him plainly to get a cab home and put his affairs in order. “For,” he said, “you are a dead man.”

Taylor’s first reaction was grief — not fear of death, but sorrow that he would never make it to China. And then, almost immediately, came a settled conviction: Unless I am greatly mistaken, I have work to do in China, and shall not die. He even told the sceptical surgeon so, and used the moment to speak to him about the joy of possibly soon being with his Master. The surgeon just told him to hurry home before he became incapable of sorting out his affairs.

Taylor could not afford a cab. Growing weaker, he walked and took omnibuses as far as he could, got home in agony, lanced the finger himself to try to release the poison, and fainted. An uncle sent for a surgeon, who said Taylor might pull through only because he had been living so soberly — bread and water, as it happened, was the best possible preparation. He ordered port wine and chops Taylor had no money to buy; the uncle quietly paid for them. Weeks of suffering followed. And then Taylor learned that two other men who had received dissection wounds at the same time had both died. He had lived.

Be careful what you take from this. Taylor did not claim a miracle that overrode medicine — he lanced the wound, took the treatment, and later wrote that faith should never make us neglect the means God provides. What he had was a conviction about his purpose that steadied him when a professional told him he was finished. He believed there was something God still meant him to do, and that belief did not make him reckless; it made him calm.

You are going to hit moments — maybe not a death sentence, but a rejection, a diagnosis, a failure, a season where everything you were building seems to be collapsing — when the message you receive is, essentially, “you are finished.” Taylor’s answer was not to deny the danger. He treated the wound seriously. His answer was that his life belonged to God, and that until God’s purpose for it was done, it would not be cut off a moment early. That is not the same as assuming nothing bad can happen to you. It is refusing to let a bad day have the last word on your life.

One thing to do when someone tells you you are finished: separate the two questions you usually mash together — “is this dangerous?” and “is this the end of me?” Take the danger seriously and act on it, like Taylor lancing the wound. But do not hand the verdict on your future to a moment of panic. Your life is not over until the God who owns it says the work is done.