A review by charles_dunham
The Physician by Noah Gordon

4.0

Rob Cole is a young boy in eleventh-century England with no living parents. He is taken in by a traveling physician, where he learns juggling, blood letting, the making of sham medicine, and several more useful medical skills. Drawn to healing, but recognizing the crude state of the science, he travels, at great risk, to the Middle East for instruction. The writing is crisp, the story is engaging, and though a few sections could have been shorter, the descriptions of the geography and culture of the time (the author admits some guesswork) were always engaging. This would be a safe recommendation for any reader not intimidated by long novels, and certainly for readers of historical fiction.