Dear and Glorious Physician

by Taylor Caldwell

  Table of Contents

  Dear and Glorious Physician

  Publishing Information

  Author Page

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Bibliography

  Preview

  Dear and Glorious Physician

  by

  Taylor Caldwell

  Publishing Information

  Dear and Glorious Physician

  by Taylor Caldwell

  Copyright © 1959

  Copyright renewed

  mobi digital edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by eNet Press Inc.

  16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034

  Digitized in the United States of America in 2012

  Revised 201208

  www.enetpress.com

  Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com

  ISBN 978-1-61886-401-7

  Author Page

  Taylor Caldwell, christened Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell, was born in Manchester, England on September 7, 1900, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve! (although it remained unpublished until 1975). She continued to write prolifically, however, despite ill health.

  Taylor Caldwell was also known by the pen names of Marcus Holland and Max Reiner as well as her married name of J. Miriam Reback. Her works include Dear and Glorious Physician, a novel detailing the exploits of Saint Luke, The Listener, written about a mysterious altruistic individual who lends an ear where it is needed, and Dynasty of Death, a saga about a family of munitions makers.

  In 1918-1919, she served in the United States Navy Reserve. In 1919 she married William F. Combs. In 1920, they had a daughter, Mary (known as ‘Peggy’). From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York. In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo. In 1931 she graduated from the University of Buffalo, and also was divorced from William Combs.

  Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, a fellow Justice employee. She had a second child with Reback, a daughter Judith, in 1932. They were married for 40 years, until his death in 1971.

  In 1934, she began to work on the novel Dynasty of Death, which she and Reback completed in collaboration. It was published in 1938 and became a best-seller. ‘Taylor Caldwell’ was presumed to be a man, and there was some public stir when the author was revealed to be a woman. Over the next 43 years, she published 42 more novels, many of them best-sellers. For instance, This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Her works sold an estimated 30 million copies. She became wealthy, traveling to Europe and elsewhere, though she still lived near Buffalo.

  Her books were big sellers right up to the end of her career. In 1979, she signed a two-novel deal for $3.9 million. During her career as a writer, she received several awards: The National League of American Pen Women gold medal (1948); The Buffalo Evening News Award (1949); The Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).

  She was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society’s monthly journal American Opinion. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion.

  Around 1970, she became interested in reincarnation. She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives. Supposedly, she agreed to be hypnotized and undergo ‘past-life regression’ to disprove reincarnation. According to Stearn’s book, The Search of a Soul - Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives (1973), Caldwell instead began to recall her own past lives - eleven in all, including one on the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria.

  In 1972, she married William Everett Stancell, a retired real estate developer, but divorced him in 1973. In 1978, she married William Robert Prestie, an eccentric Canadian 17 years her junior. This led to difficulties with her children. She had a long dispute with her daughter Judith over the estate of Judith’s father Marcus; in 1979, Judith committed suicide. Also in 1979, Caldwell suffered a stroke, which left her unable to speak, though she could still write. (She had been deaf since about 1965.) Her daughter Peggy accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell, and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.

  She died of heart failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985.

  Books by Taylor Caldwell

  1938 DYNASTY OF DEATH

  1940 THE EAGLES GATHER

  1941 THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan

  1941 TIME NO LONGER

  1942 THE STRONG CITY

  1943 THE ARM AND THE DARKNESS

  1943 THE TURNBULLS

  1944 THE FINAL HOUR

  1945 THE WIDE HOUSE

  1946 THIS SIDE OF INNOCENCE

  1947 THERE WAS A TIME

  1948 MELISSA

  1949 LET LOVE COME LAST

  1951 THE BALANCE WHEEL

  1952 THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

  1953 MAGGIE - HER MARRIAGE

  1954 NEVER VICTORIOUS, NEVER DEFEATED

  1955 YOUR SINS AND MINE

  1956 TENDER VICTORY

  1957 THE SOUND OF THUNDER

  1959 DEAR AND GLORIOUS PHYSICIAN

  1960 THE LISTENER

  1961 A PROLOGUE TO LOVE

  1963 GRANDMOTHER AND THE PRIESTS

  1963 THE LATE CLARA BEAME

  1965
A PILLAR OF IRON

  1965 WICKED ANGEL

  1966 NO ONE HEARS BUT HIM

  1967 DIALOGUES WITH THE DEVIL

  1968 TESTIMONY OF TWO MEN

  1970 GREAT LION OF GOD

  1971 ON GROWING UP TOUGH

  1972 CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS

  1973 TO LOOK AND PASS

  1974 GLORY AND THE LIGHTNING

  1975 ROMANCE OF ATLANTIS (with Jess Stearn)

  1976 CEREMONY OF THE INNOCENT

  1977 I, JUDAS (with Jess Stearn)

  1978 BRIGHT FLOWS THE RIVER

  1980 ANSWER AS A MAN

  Foreword

  This book has been forty-six years in the writing. The first version was written when I was twelve years old, the second when I was twenty-two, the third when I was twenty-six, and all through those years work did not cease on this book.

  The last version began five years ago. It was impossible to complete, as the other versions were impossible to complete, until my husband and I visited the Holy Land in 1956, and until my husband could give me the information for the last third of the book, and other assistance.

  From my early childhood Lucanus, or Luke, the great Apostle, has obsessed my mind. He was the only Apostle who was not a Jew. He never saw Christ. All that is written in his eloquent but restrained Gospel he acquired from hearsay, from witnesses, from the Mother of Christ, from disciples, and from the Apostles. His first visit to Israel took place almost a year after the Crucifixion.

  Yet he became one of the greatest of the Apostles. Like Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, he believed that Our Lord came not only to the Jews but to the Gentiles, also. He had much in common with Paul, because Paul too had never seen the Christ. Each had had an individual revelation. These two men had difficulty with the original Apostles because the latter stubbornly believed for a considerable time that Our Lord was incarnated, and died, only for the salvation of the Jews, even after Pentacost.

  Why has St. Luke always obsessed me, and why have I always loved him from childhood? I do not know. I can only quote Friedrich Nietzsche on this matter: “One hears — one does not seek; one does not ask who gives — I have never had any choice about it.”

  This book is only indirectly about Our Lord. No novel, no historical book, can convey the story of His life so well as the Holy Bible. So the story of Lucanus, or St. Luke, is the story of every man’s pilgrimage through despair and life-darkness, through suffering and anguish, through bitterness and sorrow, through doubt and cynicism, through rebellion and hopelessness to the feet and the understanding of God. This search for God and the final revelation are the only meaning in life for men. Without this search and revelation man lives only as an animal, without comfort and wisdom, and his life is futile, no matter his station or power or birth.

  A priest, who helped us write this book, said of St. Luke, “He was Our Lady’s first troubadour.” Only to Luke did Mary reveal the Magnificat, which contains the noblest words in any literature. He loved her above all the women he had ever loved.

  My husband and I have read literally over a thousand books about Luke and his times, and a bibliography is included at the end of this novel for anyone who wishes to do further reading on these matters. If the world of Luke sounds astoundingly modern to any reader, with modern implications, it is a fact.

  This book may not be the best in the world, but it was written with love and devotion for our fellow men, and so it is finally given into your hands, for it concerns all mankind.

  Almost all the events and background of St. Luke’s earlier life, manhood, and seeking, also his family and the name of his adopted father, are authentic. It should always be remembered that St. Luke was, first of all, a great physician.

  When I was twelve years old I found a large book written by a nun who then lived in Antioch, containing many of the legends about St. Luke, which will not be found in historical books about him nor in the Bible. She related the legends and some obscure traditions about him, including the many miracles, at first unknown to him, which he accomplished before he even went to the Holy Land. Some of these legends are from Egypt, some from Greece. They are included in this novel about him. He did not know at that time that he was one of the chosen of God, nor that he would attain sainthood.

  The mighty and splendid Babylonian Empire (or Chaldea) is not familiar to many readers, nor its studies in medicine and its medical treatments by the priest-physicians, and its science — all of which the Egyptians and the Greeks inherited. The Babylonian scientists understood magnetic forces, and used them. These things were contained in thousands of volumes in the wonderful University of Alexandria, which was burned by the Emperor Justinian several centuries later in an excess of misguided zeal. Modern medicine and science are beginning to rediscover these things. The present age is poorer for Justinian’s fervor. Had Babylonian science and medicine come down to us unbroken, our knowledge of the world and man would be vastly more advanced than it is at present. We have not as yet discovered how the Babylonians lighted their sails at night by a “cold fire, more brilliant than the moon,” and how they illuminated their temples by this same cold fire. Apparently they had some way of utilizing electricity unknown to us, and not in our present clumsy manner. It is reported that they used “land vessels” without horses, lighted at night, and attaining great speed. (See the Book of Daniel.) It is also reported that they used strange “stones” or a kind of ore for the cure of cancer. They were expert in the employment of hypnotism, in psychosomatic medicine. Abraham, a resident of the city of Ur, in Babylonia, brought this treatment of psychosomatic medicine to the Jews, who used it through all the centuries. The Magi, ‘the Wise Men of the East’, who brought gifts to the Infant Jesus, were Babylonians, though that nation long before had suffered a great decline.

  Where authorities differ about some of the incidents in this book, or the background, I have used the major decisions. The Gospel of St. Luke is used exclusively here, so much that appears in the Gospels of Sts. Matthew, Mark and John is not included.

  I wish, at this time, to thank Dr. George E. Slotkin of Eggertsville, N.Y., famous urologist and professor emeritus, School of Medicine, Buffalo, N.Y., for his invaluable assistance in the field of ancient as well as modern medicine.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Part One

  “Surely God chooses His servants at birth, or perhaps even before birth.”

  — Epictetus

  Chapter One

  Lucanus was never sure whether he liked or disliked his father. He was only certain that he pitied him. Simple men of no pretensions could be admired. Wise men could be honored. But his father was not simple or wise, though he considered himself the latter.

  Bookkeepers and record-gatherers had their important place in life, especially if they were diligent and knew that they had a value as bookkeepers and record-gatherers, and did not imply that they possessed larger gifts. It was not good when they spoke of ‘lesser men’ in highly cultured and superficial tones. But the mother of Lucanus smiled so tenderly and so mercifully when her husband intoned his ridiculous prejudices that the light of her compassion mollified her son.

  There was the matter of Aeneas bathing his hands in goat’s milk each morning and night, rubbing the rich fluid into every wrinkle and crevice and joint carefully. By the time he was ten years old Lucanus understood that his father was not merely trying to soften and whiten his hands but was attempting to obliterate the scars of earlier servitude. This irritated Lucanus, for even then he knew that work of any kind was not degrading unless it became so in the mind of the worker. But when Aeneas shook his wet hands delicately to dry them in the soft Syrian air, Lucanus could see the disfigured areas on the palms, and the long ugly cicatrice on the back of the slender right hand, and his pity came to him in a flood of vague love. But his real understanding was still childish.

  Aeneas was at his best when, just before the evening meal, he would pour the customary libation to th
e gods. Lucanus always watched him then with a veneration that was without words. His father’s voice, so thin and meager and lofty, as a rule, became humble and hesitant. He had gratitude that the gods had freed him, had made possible this small and pleasant house in its gardens of palms and flowers and fruit trees, had lifted him from the dust and had granted him authority over other men. But the most solemn event, to Lucanus, was when Aeneas refilled the wine cup and, with even more reverence, poured out the red liquid slowly and carefully, and said with almost inaudible softness, “To the Unknown God.”