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Sarah Gilchrist has fled London and a troubled past to join the University of Edinburgh's medical school in 1892, the first year it admits women. She is determined to become a doctor despite the misgivings of her family and society, but Sarah quickly finds plenty of barriers at school itself: professors who refuse to teach their new pupils, male students determined to force out their female counterparts, and--perhaps worst of all--her female peers who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman.Desperate for a proper education, Sarah turns to one of the city's ramshackle charitable hospitals for additional training. The St. Giles' Infirmary for Women ministers to the downtrodden and drunk, the thieves and whores with nowhere else to go.