This award-winning book is the story of a Victorian woman physician whose life encompasses the social changes of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression and two World Wars. It encapsulates the struggles all professional women experienced up until the latter part of the twentieth century. It recounts Dorothy's escape to college to avoid her mother's purposeless lifestyle. She graduates from medical school in 1900. Two years later, she makes fundamental discoveries in Hodgkin's disease which resulted in international recognition of her name. Despite this achievement she finds her career blocked by male prejudice. After her marriage, Dorothy devotes herself to fighting the discriminatory ways male physicians treated women. She pioneers the first national standards for the healthcare of pregnant women and their babies that still form the basis of present-day practice.