This historic year is vividly pictured as a young American surgeon and Canadian wife dare to enter exotic Manchu (Ch'ing) Empire only a decade after the Empress Dowager's 'Boxers' massacred foreigners. Admired as missionaries, deeply in love, Nell - on the ocean liner - begins to doubt James' judgment. James, eager to bring modern medicine to antique China, is shocked by the shabbiness of his assigned Hospital-of-Last-Resort with only male apprentices as aides. He faces poor patients with monstrous tumors, plague, stones, does operations never observed, is opposed by unbelievable...

This historic year is vividly pictured as a young American surgeon and Canadian wife dare to enter exotic Manchu (Ch'ing) Empire only a decade after the Empress Dowager's 'Boxers' massacred foreigners. Admired as missionaries, deeply in love, Nell - on the ocean liner - begins to doubt James' judgment. James, eager to bring modern medicine to antique China, is shocked by the shabbiness of his assigned Hospital-of-Last-Resort with only male apprentices as aides. He faces poor patients with monstrous tumors, plague, stones, does operations never observed, is opposed by unbelievable...