Lydia is an Irish American shopgirl with bigger aspirations than your average young woman from South Boston in the early part of the twentieth century. She marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin family. However, soon after their wedding, Henry abruptly quits medical school to create a mail-order patent medicine called Wickett's Remedy, and just as Lydia begins to adjust to her husband's new vocation, the infamous...