The physician
(Book)

Originally published: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1986.

"In eleventh-century London, 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 renowning physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival -- medicine -- makes a riveting modern classic."--back cover.