Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th-century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entrée to this all-male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body. Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients without her father's patronage. So she sets out across Europe to find where - and why - he has gone.