The Physician
Noah Gordon
 It is the year 1020. Rob Cole is the eldest of many children. His father is a Joiner in the Guild of Carpenters in London. His mother,Agnes Cole, is his father's wife. Robert has a particular Gift: he can sense when someone is going to die.When his mother and father both die, the Cole household is parceled out to various neighbors and friends. The Cole children are parceled out likewise. Rob is taken by the only one who wants him: a traveling barber-surgeon who goes only by the name of Barber. He is a fleshy man with fleshy appetites and a very great zest for life. Over the next years, he takes Rob as his apprentice. He teaches the boy how to juggle, to draw caricatures, to tell stories, to entertain a crowd, to sell the patent nostrum on which they make their living. He also teaches the boy all he knows of medicine - which is little. When Barber dies, Rob takes over his traveling medicine show. But he is restless, desiring to know more about the ways of medicine. He meets a Jewish physician in Malmesbury who tells him of schools in Córdoba, Toledo, even in far-away Persia, where the medical and scientific learning of the Muslim is taught. Unfortunately, besides being worlds away, the schools do not admit Christians - and even if they did, no country in Christendom would allow a person with such heathen learning to return. In a moment of epiphany, Rob decides that he shall take on the guise of a Jewish student, so that he can travel to Persia and study at the feet of Avicenna. Rob travels, as a Christian, from London throughout Europe to Constantinople. Here he becomes Jewish in appearance, and travels eastwards with a group of Jewish merchants, learning their ways as best he can. Rob arrives in Persia and tries to enter into the school of physicians there. He is not allowed access. He struggles to find a place in the city while searching for a way to enter the school. A chance encounter with the Shah of Persia opens for Rob the door to the school of physicians. Here he begins the study of medicine - the first formal study he has ever had in his life. At the same time he immerses himself in the life of a Persian Jew. Comparable to a surgical residency or similar term of practicum, Rob goes to a war-torn (and plague-torn) land to practice his medical knowledge. His journeys with the Shah's armies take him as far as India, where he encounters elephants, spices, and Wootz steel. He makes friends among the Muslim students of the school. Upon his return he encounters a woman he had met on his travels across Europe, a Scottish woman journeying with her father in search of superior Turkish sheep. Though she is Christian, they form a liaison, and are secretly wed. He is passed as a physician and helps to instruct new physicians in the school. Soon afterwards, Avicenna dies, and Isfahan is conquered by a rival king. Rob and his wife flee the rape and pillage and make their laborious way back to England, delivering her of children as they go. Rob struggles to locate his lost brothers and sisters, likewise to make his place amongst the terribly ignorant physicians of London. Despairing, he returns with his wife and family to Scotland, where he acts as physician to his wife's people high in the hills.