The story opens with Angela Anson—the protagonist— and two of her friends joking around by calling each other by the names of famous fictional doctors over the loudspeaker of a city hospital where they are all employed as social workers. It is San Francisco in the 1960s, and the events of the story take place against the background of the Vietnam War and the counterculture youth movement. Angela, who is a struggling actress, has been working on the women's ward of the hospital for only a few days. She has no credentials to work as a social worker. The atmosphere on the ward—where Angela's task is to report to the elderly and infirm women the public institutions where they will next be sent—has a strong impact on the sensitive young woman, who sees in the patients a reflection of...