Dr. Leonard Gillespie, the crusty senior diagnostician at New York's Blair General Hospital, has a severe disagreement with pupil, intern James Kildare, over a suspected case of Q fever. He decides to teach his stubborn assistant a lesson in dealing with the emotional causes of his patients' ills as well as the physical. To accomplish this, he fires Kildare and has him reassigned to work in a neighborhood dispensary with nurse Mary Lamont, whom he enlists with the aid of head nurse Molly Byrd to "informant" on the intern.