In this episode, a local woman comes to doc when she and her husband are in town and says that her daughter, Althea, is ill and needs him. She is obviously afraid of her husband who is a brutish domineering fellow.
When Doc comes to their farm to check on Althea he wisely brings Matt Dillon along, and they find a beaten and ill Althea in a root cellar. Matt has to threaten her father with a duel which he would surely lose unless he lets Matt remove the girl to Dodge City to recuperate.
The entire trouble started over Althea's desire to read. Her dad is a man who thinks women have less use than a cow, having no other value than to make sons, and he thinks that a woman reading books is "smarting off" to him.
While she recovers, Doc and the teen girl bond, and I'd have to say given Doc's history if something bad happened to this girl that Doc would have the saddest story of any character in a TV show until NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz, but I'll let you watch and find out what happens.
This show is talking place during the changing times of emerging women's liberation, although in 1962 it is still in its infancy. And though the episode champions the value of women as human beings in their own rights with thoughts and dreams of their own, it still leans into the belief that marriage is the most important thing that can happen to women. And, after all, Althea is reading Ivanhoe, not a calculus book! Some progressive values would be too much even for Gunsmoke.