The Physician

The Physician is a historical novel by Noah Gordon, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1986 and the opening book of a series about the Cole family. It follows Rob Cole from an English village in 1020, when he is nine years old, to the great medical school at Isfahan in Persia, taught by a figure modelled on the eleventh-century physician Avicenna.

Rob is apprenticed to a travelling barber-surgeon after his mother's death and walks with him through England and on into Europe, where he discovers that the medicine he wants to learn is taught far to the east, among people whose law will not admit a Christian as a student. He disguises his religion and his name to be accepted, and the novel's central thread is the education he gains and the risk of the pretence being discovered.

Gordon researched the period closely, and the book sets surgery, dissection and hospital practice against the religious rules governing them, with plague and regional politics supplying the pressure. It sold badly in the United States but became a bestseller in Europe, particularly in Spain and Germany, and was followed by novels about Rob's descendants.