The Physician

The Cole Trilogy (Gordon) 1

De: Noah Gordon

Narrado por: Mark Meadows

An orphan leaves Dark Ages London, taking a dangerous journey and posing as a Jew to study medicine in Persia, in "an adventurous and inspiring tale" (Library Journal).

A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift - an acute sensitivity to impending death - never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer.

Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world's most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival - medicine - makes a riveting modern classic.

The Physician is the first book in New York Times best-selling author Noah Gordon's Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.

©1986 Lise Gordon, Michael Seay Gordon and The Jamie Gordon Trust (P)2024 Audible Ltd.

Beautiful

I loved this story. I felt I was there. I now feel the need to find another.

Entertaining but missing something…

Weak story arch; difficult to root for MC. He really didn’t face much to overcome and if it could “go his way”, it always did. Kinda boring.

Very interesting history lessons.

There is a lot of very graphic physical and sexual details. Just be aware of that. But the story is very good. I enjoyed reading it.

Wonderful

I'm stingy with five star reviews but this deserves it. Fantastic historical fiction. Narrator was flawless.

excellent story

I really enjoyed this story. The author created interesting characters and gives them an exciting journey to follow as the reader.

The scope of the story

Liked the narrator, explains the mystery f the practice of medicine that is still evolving

Great narrator, good story

Wouldn’t recommend, the story never gets really good. Gets better between boring periods but the main character is not very endearing. However this is the best narrator I’ve ever heard.

Zero Historical Authenticity

Narrator does the best he could with a god awful book. Barely a paragraph went by without me cringing at the blatant inaccuracies. They are entirely too many to list but range from clothes from the Renaissance, Bible quotes in English from the King James 18th century, peasant women being literate and names being modern.

Anachronistic history wrapped in a very long yawn

I went in eager for a sweeping 11th-century epic and came away disappointed. The Physician is unnecessarily long and, despite its scope, surprisingly dull. More troubling is how sloppy the history and geography are. The narrative hints at a papal schism on the protagonist's entry into Constantinople (centuries before the actual event), jumbles topography and tribal references from the wrong centuries, and even presents the Quran as being in Persian rather than Arabic. These aren’t nitpicks—they’re immersion-breaking errors.

Equally frustrating is the book’s habit of stereotyping: cultures and religious groups are reduced to their most familiar caricatures, which cheapens the story and the people in it. For readers who value accuracy and nuance in historical fiction, this misses the mark.

What a load of shite - don’t waste a credit.

Horrendously historically innacurate - main characters had Norman names and it was based before the conquest - more likely to be called Odo or Wulfric or some such. Also using lemongrass in England and cotton - 700 years early! Just the first of very many such obvious errors. Narrator was good though.