The first female physician in the United States initially found medicine repulsive. Elizabeth Blackwell couldn't stand the sight of disease, but when a dying friend told her that her suffering would have been more bearable under a female doctor's care, Blackwell's moral-crusade upbringing overrode her distaste, and she set out to break open a profession whose gatekeepers refused to hand her, in their words, "a stick to break our heads with."

This episode follows the admission that happened as a frat-house joke, when 150 male students unanimously voted her in assuming she'd never show, through the typhus wards of Blockley Almshouse and a graduation where the dean bowed. It also confronts the messy contradictions: her rejection of germ theory, the strange and controlling household she kept, and the book about female desire so threatening that ...