The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  On the following day he learned some possible answers when he went to the herb seller’s to buy ingredients for remedies, and again found Aubrey Rufus there on the same errand.

  “Hunne is speaking against you when he can,” Rufus told him. “He says you are too forward. That you have the appearance of a ruffian and blackguard and he doubts you are a physician. He seeks to close membership in the Lyceum to any who haven’t prenticed to English physicians.”

  “What is your advice?”

  “Oh, do nothing,” Rufus said. “It’s apparent he cannot reconcile him self to sharing Thames Street with you. We all know Hunne would rip away his grandfather’s ballocks for a coin. No one will pay him heed.”

  Comforted, Rob returned to the Thames Street house.

  He would overcome their doubts with scholarship, he decided, and fell to work preparing the discourse on abdominal distemper as though he would be giving it in the madrassa. The original Lyceum near ancient Athens was where Aristotle had lectured; he wasn’t Aristotle, but he had been trained by Ibn Sina and would show these London physicians what a medical lecture could be like.

  There was interest, certainly, because every man attending the Lyceum had lost patients who had suffered agony in the lower right portion of the abdomen. But there was also general scorn.

  “A little worm?” drawled a wall-eyed physician named Sargent. “A little pink worm in the belly?”

  “A wormlike appendage, master,” Rob said stiffly. “Attached to the cecum. And suppurating.”

  “Galen’s drawings show no wormlike appendage on the cecum,” Dryfield said. “Celsus, Rhazes, Aristotle, Diascorides—who among these has written of this appendage?”

  “No one. Which does not mean it isn’t there.”

  “Have you dissected a pig, Master Cole?” Hunne asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then you know that a pig’s innards are same as a man’s. Have you ever noted a pink appendage on the cecum of a pig?”

  “It was a small pork sausage, master!” a wit cried, and there was general laughter.

  “Internally, a pig appears to be same as a man,” Rob said patiently, “but there are subtle differences. One of these is the small appendage on the human cecum.” He unrolled the Transparent Man and fixed the illustration to the wall with iron pins. “This is what I am talking about. The appendage is depicted here in the early stages of irritation.”

  “Suppose the abdominal illness is caused precisely in the way you have described,” said a physician with a thick Danish accent. “Do you then suggest a cure?”

  “I know of no cure.”

  There were groans.

  “Then why does it matter a whitebait whether or not we understand the origin of the disease?” Others voiced agreement, forgetting how much they loathed Danes in their unified eagerness to oppose the newcomer.

  “Medicine is like the slow raising of masonry,” Rob said. “We are fortunate, in a lifetime, to be able to lay a single brick. If we can explain the disease, someone yet unborn may devise a cure.”

  More groans.

  They crowded about and studied the Transparent Man.

  “Your drawing, Master Cole?” Dryfield asked, noting the signature.

  “Yes.”

  “It is an excellent work,” the chairman said. “What served as your model?”

  “A man whose belly was torn.”

  “Then you’ve seen only one such appendage,” Hunne said. “And no doubt the omnipotent voice that summoned you to our calling also told you the little pink worm in the bowel is universal?”

  It drew more laughter and Rob allowed himself to be stung. “I believe the appendage on the cecum is universal. I have seen it in more than one person.”

  “In as many as … say, four?”

  “In as many as half a dozen.”

  They were staring at him instead of at the drawing.

  “Half a dozen, Master Cole? How did you come to see inside the bodies of six human folk?” Dryfield said.

  “Some of the bellies were slit in the course of accidents. Others were laid open during fighting. They were not all my patients, and the incidents occurred over a period of time.” It sounded unlikely even to his own ears.

  “Females as well as men?” Dryfield asked.

  “Several were females,” he said reluctantly.

  “Hmmmph,” the chairman said, making it clear he thought Rob a liar.

  “Had the women been dueling, then?” Hunne said silkily, and this time even Rufus laughed. “I call it coincidence indeed that you have been able to look inside so many bodies in this manner,” Hunne said, and seeing the fierce glad light in his eyes, Rob was aware that volunteering to give a lecture at the Lyceum had been a mistake from the start.

  Julia Swane didn’t escape the Thames. On the last day of February more than two thousand people gathered at daybreak to watch and cheer as she was sewn into a sack, along with a cock, a snake, and a rock, and cast into the deep pool at St. Giles.

  Rob didn’t attend the drowning. Instead he went to Bostock’s wharf in search of the thrall whose foot he had removed. But the man wasn’t to be found and a curt overseer would say only that the slave had been taken from London to another place. Rob feared for him, knowing that a slave’s existence depended on his ability to work. At the dock he saw another slave whose back was crisscrossed with whipping sores that seemed to gnaw into his body. Rob went to his house and made up a salve of goat grease, swine grease, oil, frankincense, and copper oxide, then he returned to the wharf and spread it on the thrall’s angry flesh.

  “Here, now. What in the bloody hell is this?”

  An overseer was bearing down on them, and although Rob hadn’t quite finished spreading the salve, the slave fled.

  “This is Master Bostock’s wharf. Does he know you’re here?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The overseer glared but didn’t follow, and Rob was glad to leave Bostock’s wharf without further trouble.

  Paying patients came to him. He cured a pale and weepy woman of the flux by dosing her with boiled cow’s milk. A prosperous shipwright came in with his kirtle soaked in blood from a wrist so deeply cut that his hand seemed partially severed. The man readily admitted he had done it with his own knife, seeking to end his life while despondent with drink.

  He had almost reached the mortal depth, stopping just short of the bone. Rob knew from the cutting he had done in the maristan’s charnel house that the artery in the wrist rested close to the bone; if the man had sliced a hair deeper he would have achieved his drunken desire for death. As it was, he had severed the tough cords that governed movement and control of the thumb and first finger of his hand. When Rob had sewn and dressed the wrist, those fingers were stiff and numb.

  “Will they regain movement and feeling?”

  “It’s up to God. You did a workmanlike job. Should you try again, I think you’ll kill yourself. Therefore, if you desire to live, you must shun strong drink.”

  Rob feared the man would try again. It was the time of year when cathartics were needed because there had been no greens all winter, and he made up a tincture of rhubarb and within a week dispensed it all. He treated a man bitten in the neck by a donkey, lanced a brace of boils, wrapped a sprained wrist, and set a broken finger. One midnight a frightened woman summoned him well down Thames Street—into what he had come to regard as no-man’s land, the area midway between his house and Hunne’s. He would have been fortunate had she summoned Hunne, for her husband was grievously taken. He was a groom at Thorne’s stables who had cut his thumb three days before, and that evening he had gone to bed with pains in his loins. Now his jaws were locked, his spittle became frothy and could scarcely pass through his clenched teeth, and his body assumed the shape of a bent bow as he raised his stomach and supported himself on his heels and the top of his head. Rob never had seen the disease before but recognized it from Ibn Sina’s written description; it was episthotonos, “the back
ward spasm.” There was no known cure, and the man died before morning.

  The experience at the Lyceum had left the taste of ashes in Rob’s mouth. That Monday he forced himself to attend the March meeting as a spectator who held his tongue, but the damage already was done and he saw that they regarded him as a foolish braggart who had allowed his imagination to rule. Some smiled at him in derision while others regarded him coldly. Aubrey Rufus didn’t invite his company but glanced away when their eyes met, and he sat at a table with strangers who didn’t address him.

  The lecture concerned fractures of the arm, forearm, and ribs, and dislocations of the jaw, shoulder, and elbow. Given by a short, round man named Tyler, it was the poorest kind of lesson, containing so many errors in method and fact that it would have sent Jalal the bonesetter into a rage. Rob sat and kept his silence.

  As soon as the speaker was done, they turned their conversation to the witch’s drowning.

  “Others will be caught, mark my word,” said Sargent, “for witches practice their foul art in groups. In examining folks’ bodies, we must seek to detect and report the devil’s spot.”

  “We must take care to appear above reproach,” Dryfield said thoughtfully, “for many think physicians are close to witchcraft. I’ve heard it said that a physician-witch can cause patients to foam at the mouth and stiffen as though dead.”

  Rob thought uneasily of the stable groom who had been taken by episthotonos, but no one accosted or accused him.

  “How else is a male witch recognized?” Hunne asked.

  “They appear much as any other men,” Dryfield said. “Though some say they cut their pricks like heathens.”

  Rob’s own scrotum tightened with fear. As soon as possible he took his leave and knew he wouldn’t return, for it wasn’t safe to attend a place where life could be forfeit if a colleague should witness him passing water.

  If his experience at the Lyceum had resulted only in disappointment and tarnished reputation, at least he had hope in his work, and rude health, he told himself.

  But the following morning Thomas Hood, the red-haired snoop, appeared at the house on Thames Street with two armed companions.

  “What can I do for you?” Rob asked coldly.

  Hood smiled. “We are all three summoners for the Bishop’s Court.”

  “Yes?” Rob asked, but he already knew.

  It pleased Hood to hawk and spit onto the physician’s clean floor. “We are come to place you in arrest, Robert Jeremy Cole, and bring you to God’s justice,” he said.

  77

  THE GRAY MONK

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked when they were on their way. “Court will be held on the South Porch at St. Paul’s.”

  “What is the charge?”

  Hood shrugged and shook his head.

  When they arrived at St. Paul’s he was ushered into a small room filled with waiting folk. There were guards at the door.

  He had a sense that he had lived through this experience before. In limbo all morning on a hard bench, listening to the gabble of a flock of men in religious habit, he might have been back in the realm of the Imam Qandrasseh, but this time he wasn’t there as physician to the court. He felt he was a sounder man than he had ever been, yet he knew that by churchly reckoning he was as guilty as anyone hailed to judgment that day.

  But he was not a witch.

  He thanked God that Mary and their sons weren’t with him. He wanted to request permission to go to the chapel to pray but knew it wouldn’t be granted, so he silently prayed where he was, asking God to keep him from being sewn into a sack with a cock, a snake, and a stone and cast into the deep.

  He worried about the witnesses they might have summoned: whether they had called the physicians who had heard him tell of poking about within human bodies, or the woman that had watched him treat her husband who had stiffened and foamed at the mouth before dying. Or Hunne, the dirty bastard, who would invent any sort of lie to make him out a witch and be rid of him.

  But he knew that if they had made up their minds, witnesses wouldn’t matter. They would strip him and see his circumcision as proof, and they would search his body until they decided they had found the witch’s spot.

  Doubtless they had as many methods as the Imam for gaining a confession.

  Dear God …

  He had more than enough time for his fear to mount. It was early afternoon before he was called into the clerics’ presence. Seated on an oak throne was a squinting elderly bishop in faded brown wool alb, stole, and chasuble; from listening to others outside Rob knew he was Aelfsige, ordinary of St. Paul’s and a hard punisher. To the bishop’s right were two middle-aged priests in black, and to his left, a young Benedictine in severe dark gray.

  A clerk produced Holy Writ, which Rob was bade to kiss and swear solemn oath that his testimony would be true. It began matter-of-factly.

  Aelfsige peered at him. “What is your name?”

  “Robert Jeremy Cole, Excellency.”

  “Residence and occupation?”

  “Physician of Thames Street.”

  The bishop nodded to the priest on his right.

  “Did you, on the twenty-fifth day of December last, join with a foreign Hebrew in unprovoked attack on Master Edgar Burstan and Master William Symesson, freeborn London Christians of the Parish of St. Olave?”

  For a moment Rob was puzzled and then he felt tremendous relief as he realized they weren’t stalking him for sorcery. The sailors had reported him for coming to the aid of the Jew! A minor charge, even if he were to be convicted.

  “A Norman Jew named David ben Aharon,” the bishop said, blinking rapidly. His vision appeared to be very bad.

  “I have never before heard the Jew’s name nor those of the complainants. But the seamen have reported it untruly. It was they who had been unfairly ganging on the Jew. That was why I intervened.”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “I am baptized.”

  “You attend regular service?”

  “No, Excellency.”

  The bishop sniffed and nodded gravely. “Fetch the deponent,” he told the gray monk.

  Rob’s sense of relief dissipated at once when he saw the witness.

  Charles Bostock was richly clothed and wore a heavy gold neck chain and a large seal ring. During his identification he told the court he had been elevated to the rank of thane by King Harthacnut in reward for three voyages as a merchant-adventurer, and that he was an honorary canon of St. Peter’s. The churchmen treated him with deference.

  “Now then, Master Bostock. Do you know this man?”

  “He is Jesse ben Benjamin, a Jew and a physician,” Bostock said flatly.

  The nearsighted eyes fixed on the merchant. “You are certain of the Jew portion?”

  “Excellency, four or five years ago I was traveling the Byzantine Patriarchate, buying goods and serving as envoy from His Blessed Holiness in Rome. In the city of Ispahan I learned of a Christian woman who had been left alone and bereft in Persia by the death of her Scottish father, and had married a Jew. Upon receiving invitation, I could not resist going to her home to investigate the whisperings. There, to my dismay and disgust, I saw that the stories were true. She was wife to this man.”

  The monk spoke for the first time. “You’re certain this is he, good thane, the same man?”

  “I am sure, holy brother. He appeared some weeks ago on my wharf and tried to charge me dear for butchering up one of my thralls, for which of course I would not pay. When I saw his face I understood that I knew it from somewhere, and I studied on the matter until I recalled. He is the Jew physician of Ispahan, of that there is no doubt. A despoiler of Christian females. In Persia, the Christian woman already had one child by this Jew and he had bred her a second time.”

  The bishop leaned forward. “On solemn oath, what is your name, master?”

  “Robert Jeremy Cole.”

  “The Jew lies,” Bostock said.

  “Master merchant,”
the monk said. “Was it only a single time that you saw him in Persia?”

  “Yes, one occasion,” Bostock said grudgingly.

  “And you did not see him again for almost five years?”

  “Closer to four years than five. But that is true.”

  “Yet you are certain?”

  “Yes. I tell you, I have no doubt.”

  The bishop nodded. “Very well, Thane Bostock. You have our thanks,” he said.

  While the merchant was escorted away, the clerics looked at Rob and he struggled to remain calm.

  “If you are a freeborn Christian, does it not seem strange,” the bishop said thinly, “that you are brought before us on two separate charges, and the one states that you aided a Jew and the other states that you are a Jew yourself?”

  “I am Robert Jeremy Cole. I was baptized half a mile from here, in St. Botolph’s. The parish book will bear me out. My father was Nathanael, a journeyman joiner in the Corporation of Carpenters. He lies buried in St. Botolph’s churchyard, as does my mother, Agnes, who in life was a seamstress and an embroiderer.”

  The monk addressed him coldly. “Did you attend the church school at St. Botolph’s?”

  “Two years only.”

  “Who taught the Scriptures there?”

  Rob closed his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “That was Father … Philibert. Yes, Father Philibert.”

  The monk glanced inquiringly at the bishop, who shrugged and shook his head. “The name Philibert isn’t familiar.”

  “Then Latin? Who taught you Latin?”

  “Brother Hugolin.”

  “Yes,” the bishop said. “Brother Hugolin taught Latin at the St. Botolph’s school. I recall him well. He has been dead these many years.” He pulled his nose and regarded Rob nearsightedly. Finally he sighed. “We shall check the parish book, of course.”

  “You will find it as I have said, Excellency,” Rob told him.

  “Well, I shall allow you to purge yourself by oath that you are the person you claim to be. You are instructed to appear again before this court in three weeks’ time. With you must come twelve free men as compurgators, each willing to swear that you are Robert Jeremy Cole, Christian and freeborn. Do you understand?”