It’s the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry and women, espe­cial­ly Jew­ish women, are lim­it­ed by men and soci­ety as to what they can be. Raised as a boy on her father’s ship, Rachel Romain’s remark­able life takes twists and turns con­stant­ly. As a teenag­er, her father real­izes that a mer­chant ship is no place for a young woman. Rachel is put ashore in Lon­don against her will to be raised by her uncle, a sur­geon, and aunt, a sur­gi­cal nurse. She falls in love with nurs­ing, but nev­er sat­is­fied, she demands to be a sur­geon, unheard of and impos­si­ble in Eng­land in the 19th cen­tu­ry for a Jew­ish woman. When she is inspired by the work of a Hun­gar­i­an sur­geon on the pre­ven­tion of infec­tion, she sets about to prove his the­o­ries by becom­ing a sur­geon for the Con­fed­er­a­cy dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, where she finds answers and love.