London Hospital

The hospital staff's caseload includes striking Jewish workers beaten up by the police, children asphyxiating from diphtheria and an incredible piece of open-heart surgery by the flamboyant Mr Hurry Fenwick. Meanwhile, emergency room Nurse Ada Russell faces a difficult dilemma when Dr James Walton asks him to marry her. Relationships are not permitted between staff in the hospital.

The streets are teeming with trouble and gangland rivalry is rife. One of the first people to stagger through the hospital doors is leader of the Blind Beggar Boys, Nobby Clark, who has a bullet wound. Elsewhere, the Light Department at the hospital is using a radical new technique, to treat appalling cases of skin disease bought on by the cramped, unsanitary conditions in the East End.

Probationer Ethel Bennett suffers a long night of rising tension as she nurses the injured docker whose leg wounds are not healing. On the Children's Ward, children are dying from an epidemic of diarrhea and vomiting that has swept through the slums with the hot weather. Hospital funding is low and the staff learn that things are only set to get worse.

With the hospital facing imminent financial collapse, Chairman Sydney Holland launches a campaign to raise money. He hires clerks to write 20,000 begging letters, and rigs collecting buckets to the top of lamp-posts so that passengers passing the hospital on omnibuses can drop in their spare coins.