Dr. Cole “was a highly qualified physician, and we have very few of them on hand,” said Dr. Amara Jambai, director of prevention and control at the health ministry. “You can imagine what this does to the younger cohort. It’s like having a general falling in battle. It just brings more misery. It’s not good. When you have a health system that’s constrained, it’s a bit too much.”

Connaught, where Dr. Cole worked, is Sierra Leone’s leading referral hospital, so Ebola patients inevitably go there, initially at least. But it does not have a treatment center for them or an isolation ward.

It was one such patient who apparently passed the deadly disease to the doctor. “He was trying to see a patient, and the patient was falling,” Dr. Jambai said. “The patient was trying to help himself to the couch, and the patient fell.” The patient was positive for Ebola, he added.

Dr. Cole trained in the Soviet Union in the 1980s before returning to Sierra Leone in 1987, Dr. Jambai said.