It’s 1940 and polio, AKA the Great Crippler, is on the rampage. Families are terrorized as healthy kids are cut down. No one knows how to prevent or cure the disease. No one even knows how it spreads. The only treatment is a painful and dreaded regimen of splints and braces.

At this terrible moment, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, a nurse from the Outback of Australia, makes the outrageous claim that the treatment itself causes the crippling of polio. With her radical new therapy, she challenges the medical establishment, inspires a populist following, and ignites the biggest clinical controversy of mid-century America.

Some claim Sister Kenny is a remarkable bedside clinician and a savior of the children. To others, she’s a liar and a cheat, a clinical con artist peddling a dangerous remedy. The man-sized and flamboyant old woman is not a nice lady, by her own reckoning. But what is a woman with big ideas to do when she is thwarted at every turn by men who think they know better?

The novel is based on the absolutely true though factually murky tale of the single most controversial figure in 20th century medicine. It’s also about how women and girls burst the confines imposed on them to fashion lives of meaning and dignity. There’s a painful lesson to be learned: any refuge can become a trap.