The Physician by Noah Gordon: Rob J. Cole’s Journey From Barber-Surgeon’s Apprentice to Avicenna’s School in Persia
A sweeping account of the life of Rob J. Cole, a nine-year-old London orphan who suffers countless misfortunes but, over a lifetime of travel, meets wonderful friends who stay by his side.
Author: Noah Gordon (1926–2021)
Title: The Physician (1986), first book of the Cole trilogy
Format: English Kindle edition, 898 pages
Scope: Historical novel set in the eleventh century
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B00840CY8Y (ASIN B00840CY8Y)
The Barber’s Apprentice
Rob starts out as apprentice to a barber-surgeon, known simply as Barber, who teaches him to juggle and perform for the crowds in the towns they visit. After the tricks and entertainment, they see the sick people who ask for advice and sell them jars of a healing remedy; that is how they make a living. Barber becomes the boy’s main support, while Rob’s brothers and sisters are sent to other homes and fate separates them for good.
To Persia, in Disguise
After years as an apprentice, Rob begins to hunger for knowledge, science and the understanding of the human body, mysteries that in the eleventh century the Church condemned as witchcraft. So he travels for two long years to Persia to meet Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and become his pupil. Learning to speak and write a foreign language is a hard struggle. He passes himself off as Jesse ben Benjamin, a Jew born in England whose parents never taught him the culture of his people, so that he can go unnoticed and be accepted as a student in Isfahan.
Life at the Madrasa
His passion and determination make him stand out, and he quickly catches up. His friends at the madrasa are fellow trainee doctors, and this is one of the most exciting stages of his life: he treats prisoners, sees patients and attends classes in law, philosophy and medicine. On one assignment he is sent with an expedition to a city rumoured to be struck by plague, and keeps a journal describing the patients’ symptoms and the treatments they try.
Noah Gordon
Noah Gordon (1926–2021) was an American writer from Worcester, Massachusetts, who worked as a journalist and science editor before turning to fiction. The Physician received a modest welcome in the United States but became a phenomenon in Europe, especially in Germany and Spain, where it was a long-running bestseller and made Gordon one of the most popular foreign novelists. He followed it with two more books about descendants of Rob J. Cole, Shaman and Matters of Choice, which carry the family’s medical tradition into nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.
History and Imagination
Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, was a real Persian physician and philosopher, whose Canon of Medicine was used as a textbook in Europe for centuries. Gordon places him in Isfahan and builds around him a vivid picture of a society where medicine, astronomy and philosophy flourished at a time when Europe knew far less. Historians point out that the novel takes liberties, compressing events and simplifying beliefs, but as a story about the hunger for knowledge it is hard to beat.
On Screen
In 2013 the novel was filmed in Germany as Der Medicus, directed by Philipp Stölzl, with Tom Payne as Rob, Ben Kingsley as Avicenna and Stellan Skarsgård as Barber. The film simplifies the plot considerably, so readers will find much more in the book.
Forbidden Knowledge
The story goes on through wars and other crises in which Rob cleverly protects his own and confronts harsh rules that stop him from fully understanding the causes of disease. For Christians, Muslims and Jews alike, dissection of the human body was forbidden in the eleventh century, so understanding how it works was extremely difficult; animal dissection led to conclusions that were sometimes right and sometimes wrong. A long, absorbing novel that has won readers all over the world.
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