The Doctor's wife is a fifty something woman who lives with his husband (an eye doctor) when a strange epidemic white blindness strikes the city and the country. She pretends to be blind as well so that she is not separated from her husband by the time the health authorities come to take him to quarantine to try to limit the epidemic blindness. She expects to become blind at any time but she never does. And so she becomes the only person capable of seeing while locked in a old mental institution with several others stroke by the misterious blindness in below human conditions and subject to terrible ordeals. She eventually leads a small group out of the institution and into the city in search for food and shelter, in a cahotic society.