Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entree to this all male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body. Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe to find where and why he has gone. Following clues from his occasional enigmatic letters, Gabriella crosses Switzerland, Germany and France, entering strange and forbidding cities. She travels to Scotland, the Netherlands, and finally to Morocco. In each new land she probes the mystery of her father's flight, and opens new mysteries of her own. Not just mysteries of ailments and treatments, but ultimate mysteries of mortality, love, and the timeless human spirit. The novel contains medical lore and sensuous, vivid details of Renaissance life.

Map: Gabriella's journey God's work or the devil's machinations Salt and sweet, tears and milk Dr. Cardano's house A tether One must be kind to beasts Before the sea of black woods The widow Gudrun Fires that never burn Dr. Rainer Fuchs, professor of botany Where the root is in the house, the devil can do no harm Manifestations of solar madness Lost governance of the whole What was lost was returned The patient owns the remedy

The vanishing bend in the path To make way for the new Sorrow be banished The sap that slows the world The mountains are full of wonderful creatures Like cures like A border between continents My father's keeper We are housed by the past The basin of the dead A secret accord Make his entrance wide Stitching sky to mountain Braiding the tides.