The final installment of a medical trilogy, Stone Mother refers to the old Los Angeles County Hospital.

On entering residency training, a married couple carry their 1960s activism into the ‘70s. They struggle to balance overwhelming responsibilities with their ideals, attempting to reform the “system,” but ultimately it is their personal lives that suffer.

Max and Jan King start their internships at LA county hospital at the end of the sixties. Max finds his way after four difficult years of medical school. Jan struggles with an abusive program. Max meets Abe Grant, an activist, the son of a communist and is drawn into far left politics. During the year conditions become untenable at the hospital. The young physicians on the internal medicine service hold a heal in protesting sub-standard care. In the end the establishment resident who chairs the Intern-Resident association co-opts them and wheedles a pay raise for everyone that takes the steam out of their activism. At the end of the year Max becomes chair of the activist group and learns that their pay raise came out of the hospital's clinical budget and has put them right back in the same mess.