Magnificent Obsession was one of four of his books that were eventually made into blockbuster motion pictures, the other three being The Robe, White Banners and The Big Fisherman.
Robert Merrick is resuscitated by a rescue crew after a boating accident. The crew is thus unable to save the life of Dr. Hudson, a physician renowned for his ability to help people, who was having a heart attack at the same time on the other side of the lake. Merrick then decides to devote his life to making up for the doctor's, and becomes a physician himself.
The book's plot portrays Mrs. Hudson, the widow, moving to Europe after her daughter, Joyce, is married. Merrick progresses in his career, and in the story's climax, gets involved in a railway accident in which Mrs. Hudson suffers serious injury. Merrick is instrumental in her recovery.
The story behind the novel, and the identity of the surgeon on whose life it is based, is mentioned in articles in the American Association of Neurosurgeons' journal AANS Neurosurgeon, Magnificent Obsession and "Inspirations and Epiphanies"
The theme of the book is based on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 6:1-4):
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.....That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
The philosophy behind the book is also partly that of "pay it forward", the idea that good deeds received are not to be paid back to the doer of the deed, but to a needing person in the future.
Douglas later wrote a book in response to the flood of letters he received from readers who wanted to know where they could find the book to which he referred in the novel, Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal. The Robert Merrick character decoded the journal, from which he learned the secret of his extraordinary success as a doctor. (According to the book, the secret was the literal practice of doing good deeds secretly, and thereby reaping spiritual power to use in becoming an excellent Doctor.).
Extracts from "TIME TO REMEMBER ":
During the winter of 1887 Papa read Ben Hur to us. It was the first full-length novel I had encountered and it made a deep impression on me. Whether that may have had something to do with my later interest in first-century pastoral Palestine and the contrasting blare of brass in Rome I do not know. Perhaps not. I tried to reread Ben Hur when I was plotting The Robe and found it slow going. (However, I have had the same experience with other famous books which I have come back to after a lapse of many years.) When I was about sixteen I read Innocents Abroad with whoops of merriment. I had another go at it when I was fifty and found its humor decidedly corny. I could be jailed for the remark I am tempted to add here: Mark Twain had only a couple of tricks on which his wit depended, enormous exaggeration and self-deprecation.
...
When my opus was finished I named it Magnificent Obsession, and sent it to a publisher who had previously brought out a book of mine, a group of religious essays. My manuscript promptly bounced back. The publisher (a good friend of mine, by the way, both before and after he rejected my story) explained that his readers saw no future for it. He figured that it might sell a few hundred copies to my parishioners, but he would prefer not to list it.