The adventure includes not only a dangerous journey, but a risky impersonation as he wins the Shah's favor, falls in love and becomes a well-regarded man of medicine. As he grows to manhood, he wants to study more about medicine and learns of a legendary physician teaching at a Persian University where Christian students are forbidden.

Bob Cole is orphaned in London and apprenticed to a barber surgeon. My favorite line from this fascinating, historical novel set in Saxon England and 11th-century Persia. 'But it came to seem that Kilmarnock (in Scotland) had always been his life, and that what had happened before was a tale he had heard told around the fire when the wind blew cold.' Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice. The Physician is the first book in New York Times–bestselling author Noah Gordon’s Dr. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival-medicine-makes a riveting modern classic. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. But as he matures, his strange gift-an acute sensitivity to impending death-never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer.Īrab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine.

An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this “rich” and “vivid” historical novel from a New York Times–bestselling author ( The New York Times).Ī child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her.

The physician noah gordon review