READING HISTORICAL FICTION – NOAH GORDON’S THE PHYSICIAN

  

         I read The Physician by Noah Gordon.  It is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback, but well worth reading.  It follows the life of Rob Cole, an eleventh century orphan in London who becomes a barber surgeon and travels with his mentor throughout England selling potions and entertaining crowds by juggling. He has the gift and calling of a healer and hopes to learn real medicine.  At that time King Canute ruled England and life for most of the British Isles was harsh with high mortalities for all age groups.  Cole learns from a Jewish patient that the only decent medical school is in Persia. They don’t take Christians but they do take Jews, so he pretends to be a Jew and begins the long trek to Persia where he manages to get accepted so he can study with Avicenna.  Gordon studied medieval history, history of medicine, and the cultural and political histories of Persia and Great Britain to provide the background and feeling of authenticity for his novel.  It is a wonderful novel because it has so many subplots and events, like reading a Russian novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

   

        Most of my knowledge of medieval history came from courses as an undergraduate with Wallace K. Ferguson at NYU who focused on the renaissance or, as he preferred to call it, the transition from medieval to modern society.  I’ve read several books on medical history so I could check the novel against what I knew.  I know some scholars who never read historical fiction because they feel they would be deluded into believing that the history of that time is accurate when it is more likely that an author will project the present dressed up in the past and that past would be a mixture of guesswork and reality.  There is that risk, of course. But I would not shun reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace just because the author did not fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The satisfaction I get from historical fiction outweighs the errors that might creep into my understanding of past societies. A good novelist spends time in the library or doing web searches for authentic detail and broad overviews of the places and times that are described in the novel. The reader benefits by getting a general overview of a piece of history of biographical knowledge, or cultural awareness that would otherwise be absent. In some cases a good historical novel stimulates interest in reading more about that period.  I know I shall check out the life of Avicenna, the great Persian physician and scholar whose works gradually found their way into later medieval learning and the first medical schools in Europe.