Cheney receives a letter from a friend pleading that she come to a remote spot in the Ozark Mountains. The friend is having a baby, and there are no doctors available in the primitive wilderness. Though she is warned about the mountain folks, Cheney feels compelled to go and provide medical care to her friend and the community.

Dr. Cheney Duvall, weary of being rejected for jobs simply because she is a woman, jumps at the chance to care for two hundred frontier brides-to-be on a sea voyage from New York to Washington Territory, but with the journey looming before her, Cheney begins to doubt whether she is really prepared for the responsibility.

Cheney Duvall's attempt to help the mountain folks in the primitive wilderness of the Ozark Mountains had proven to be a difficult experience for both her and her nurse, Shiloh Iron. When they return to her home in New York, Cheney determines to go into private practice with Devlin Buchanan, a highly successful physician who had previously asked her to marry him. A cholera outbreak threatens when an infected steamship arrives.

Working in the hospital proves to be quite different from Cheney's experience in private practice. One of the conflicts Cheney faces is that of fair and conscientious medical treatment of what are considered unfit persons. San Francisco teems with brothels, criminal gangs, poverty-stricken vagrants, and immigrants. The hospital's board of directors has decreed that none of these people will receive treatment, regardless of their ability to pay. When...