With her last strength, poor orphan Ida Lenze drags herself to the Berlin Charité with acute appendicitis, where young staff doctor Emil Behring saves her life with an emergency operation. He's one of the few surgeons who can do the tricky new procedure. Behring applies to work for famed institute director Robert Koch. The eyes of the world are on Koch, who is working on a remedy for tu..

Ida suffers under the strict thumb of Deaconess Matron Martha, making friends with shy young nurse Therese. Therese is attracted to Ida, as is med student Georg Tischendorf. While Ida's job at the clinic gets her interested in medicine, artistically talented Georg is just studying for his father's sake. Behring tells Ida that women can study medicine in Switzerland - but not in the German Reich -..

Paul Ehrlich's wife Hedda is ready to give birth, but the midwife can't get the foetus turned the right way. When the child's pulse starts to fade and the situation gets critical, there's only one surgeon left at the clinic who can help: Emil Behring. Meanwhile, thousands of physicians from around the world arrive in Berlin for the World Medical Convention to hear Koch speak: His careful announcem..

Treating contagious cases carries its dangers: Nurse Therese comes down with TBC and is supposed to leave the Charité - as is usual - to die in a women's house. But with Virchow's help, Ida fights to let Therese remain at the Charité. Meanwhile, Robert Koch tests his new TBC remedy on himself and his lover, Hedwig. His tuberculine has serious side effects, so Ida is recruited to secretly tend to f..

News of Robert Koch's miracle drug tuberculine travels the world. Berlin is overrun by consumption patients and doctors, who lay siege to the Charité night and day. Koch hopes his breakthrough will finally get him the finances he needs to get divorced and live with Hedwig. But the tuberculine fails to heal more and more patients. Therese dies. People start to doubt Koch. Ida blames herself for ins..

Hagenbeck's "Peoples of the World Show" at the Berlin Zoo brings an exotic patient to the Charité: An Indian woman has come down with measles, a disease which has been wiped out in the Reich thanks to inoculation. Virchow, the unchallenged Number 1 at the Charité again after his triumph over his colleague Koch, is fascinated by anthropology and accepts the patient as an object of demonstration. Nu..