The Road to Bithynia: A Novel of Luke, the Beloved Physician

by Frank G. Slaughter

  Probus threw up his hands in disgust. “Anybody but Paul could see it, but he is so certain that he will be the chief minister when Christ comes that he can’t understand anything but an earthly kingdom. As long as you let Thecla stay under his influence there will be no real life together for the two of you.”

  Luke smiled. “I am not entirely without method, Probus. Apollos Lucanus is pleading my case with Thecla far more eloquently than I could do myself. But I am going to ask a favor of you. Will you stay in Ephesus and look after Thecla and the child until Theophilus comes?”

  “Would you trust me with your wife and the baby? Paul insists that I am not even a real Christian.”

  Luke smiled and gripped the thin man’s shoulder. “I would trust you with my life,” he said simply. “Our friendship is a rock to which I have returned for shelter again and again.”

  “And I would do the same for you, Luke. Only my loyalty to you has kept me from deserting Paul and his mystical ideas a long time ago.”

  As they were preparing to depart Paul said to Luke before the others, “I am not unmindful of the sacrifice you are making in going with us, Luke. And therefore I am designating you not only as our physician but as a teacher also, with full authority to represent me and the Church before the Macedonians.” While this might have seemed a lightly placed honor, in view of his long associations with the Christians Luke knew that it was much more, for Paul did not easily relinquish any of the authority granted to him as apostle to the Gentiles. Only Barnabas and now Silas, who had become Paul’s closest traveling companion, could claim such a right.

  XI

  So we sailed from Troas and struck a straight course for Samothrace, Luke wrote Thecla a few weeks after their departure from Ephesus. And from there we went on to Philippi, a Roman colony, the leading town in this part of Macedonia. This is a very interesting place, for it was before this city that Mark Antony defeated the murderers of Julius Caesar.

  Luke put down the stylus with which he had been writing upon a wax tablet and went to the window. From the elevation on which the house stood his gaze encompassed the plain of Philippi lying between Mount Haemas and Mount Pangaeus, with roses already blooming on the Pangaean foothills. The plain was green, and in the bright afternoon sunlight Luke could almost imagine himself looking at the very ridge upon which Brutus and Cassius had camped on their flight from Rome after the assassination of the greatest of the Caesars. Left of the open space of the plain lay the marsh across which Mark Antony had led his forces to attack the hill where Cassius had died. Augustus had named the city a Roman colonia with the title of Colonia Julia Philippensis, and before its very gates Antony and Cleopatra had been forced to bow to the power of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome to be deified. Luke and his companions had entered Philippi along the Egnatian Way through the magnificent archway which marked the pomerium, the line inside which foreign gods were not permitted to be worshiped and where the divine emperor himself held sway with the other Olympians.

  Luke turned back from the window and picked up the stylus once more and continued to write:

  We have been in this town some days, and on the Sabbath we went outside the gate, to the bank of the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and began to talk to the women who had met there. Among them was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple goods from the town of Thyatira, and she stayed to listen to us. She was already a worshiper of God, and the Lord so moved upon her heart that she accepted the message spoken by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she begged us, “If you have made up your mind that I am a real believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house.” And since she continued to insist that we do so, it is from her house that I write you now.

  We have met with great success here, but a strange thing has happened about which I am somewhat troubled. As we were on our way to a place of prayer, a slave girl met us who is subject to fits in which she speaks with tongues and has the gift of fortunetelling by which her owners make great profits. This girl kept following Paul and the rest of us, shrieking, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, and they are proclaiming to you a way of salvation.” After which she would fall down in a fit. When she continued to do this Paul became much annoyed at her and said to the evil spirit within her, if in truth it was such and not some other disease which caused the fits, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I order you to come out of her.”

  It was like a scene from a Greek drama. The girl was lying on the ground, jerking and shrieking that Paul and the others were servants of the Most High God, and a considerable crowd had gathered as a result of the commotion. When Paul adjured the evil spirit to come out of her, the girl at once got up off the ground, so that the crowd murmured with a great wonder at what they had seen, and many followed to listen to us. Her owners were very angry at Paul’s interference, and I believe that they are going to try to make trouble for him, since this happened inside the pomerium, where the Roman authorities have forbidden anyone to preach or worship any but their own gods.

  But you are not to worry about us, my darling, for this is a Roman colony and, being Romans by birth, we are safe. If Theophilus has already come, tell him that I have just heard that Junius Gallio, of whom you have heard me speak, is lately come to Corinth as proconsul of that province, and I hope to see him later when we reach that city. I pray daily that our mission may meet with success so that I may return to you in a short time. Give Probus my greeting in Christ and kiss the baby Apollos Lucanus for me.

  Your loving husband,

  Luke

  The letter finished, Luke put down the stylus and blew away the shavings of wax from the tablet. Travel by ship from Philippi and other Greek cities to Ephesus was frequent, and there were also frequent caravans traveling along the Egnatian Way to Troas and the cities of the eastern coast of the Aegean, so he knew the letter would reach Thecla within two weeks at most. And by that time he hoped that their mission in Philippi would be finished and they could move on, bringing nearer his return to Thecla.

  As Luke was leaving the house to dispatch his letter in the marketplace where the caravans stopped, he saw a group of Lydia’s servants moving toward it, carrying someone on a litter. Thinking that Paul had gotten in trouble, he hurried to meet them, but when he came closer he saw that it was the slave girl from whom the apostle had released the evil spirit just the day before. She was unconscious now, and there were bruises about her head and on her face. Lydia herself was following the litter. “Thank God you are here, Luke,” she said. “The owners of this girl have beaten her until she is almost dead, all because she listened to Paul and refused to tell fortunes for them.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “On the street; she had run away from them and fallen in a faint.”

  While Luke was looking at the girl, her body began to jerk, but only the right arm and leg seemed to be involved. This spasm was much more severe than the one she had exhibited yesterday, so that he was forced to restrain her else she would have fallen from the litter.

  “Take her into the house,” he directed the servants. “I will come and take care of her.”

  By the time they had transferred the slave girl to a couch the spasm had stopped, but the girl still remained unconscious. Luke examined her carefully. There was an egg-shaped swelling over her left temple, apparently where she had been struck an especially hard blow in the beating.

  “What do you think happened to her?” Lydia asked.

  Luke pointed to the egg-shaped swelling. “She must have been struck on the head hard enough to bring on unconsciousness. But there is a strange thing here. I have never seen a convulsion before involving only one side.”

  “She was having one of the fits when I found her in the street,” Lydia said. “Many people have gone to listen to Paul speak because they heard how he cured this girl yesterday. Now her owners will claim that she is not cu
red and they will not believe him.”

  The same thought was in Luke’s mind. Luke understood that an evil spirit had been sent out of her, but with convulsions brought on by a subsequent beating, the people in the city might think that her cure had been only temporary, if indeed a cure had happened at all. And then he had a thought. “Was there a crowd around her when you found her, Lydia?” he asked.

  The shopkeeper shook her head. “She had just fallen. I know that, for I saw her stagger and sink to the ground.”

  “Perhaps no one else knows of this, then. Caution your servants not to speak of it, and I will see what I can find out about her injuries. We may be able to cure her from these convulsions.”

  There was a fine library at Philippi, near the great forum that occupied a central position in the city. Vaguely Luke remembered a description of injuries such as this in the writings of Hippocrates, and since all large cities contained scrolls of the writings of the father of medicine in their libraries, he hoped to find the answer he sought there. Nor did he have to search very long. Of injuries to the head the great Hippocrates had written five hundred years before:

  When a person has sustained a mortal wound of the head . . . for the most part convulsions seize the other part of the body; for if the wound is situated on the left side, the convulsions will seize the right side of the body; or if the wound be on the right side of the head, the convulsion attacks the left side of the body.

  Luke put down the scroll and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The girl did show convulsions on the right side of the body, and the injury did seem to be in the region of the left temple. But Hippocrates had spoken of mortal wounds, and the girl’s injury did not seem that severe. Then he remembered the soldier injured by the kick of a horse in the Camp of Mars outside Pisidian Antioch. He had shown just these one-sided convulsions, and when Luke had drilled his skull with a trepan in about the same area of the temple as the swelling on the slave girl’s head, he had found an accumulation of blood. A soon as it was released the man had gotten dramatically well. Could this be a similar case? he wondered.

  Luke picked up the scroll he had been reading and unwound it until he came to the section where Hippocrates described the indications for drilling the skull with the trepan:

  Of these modes of fracture, the following require trepanning: the contusion, whether the bone be laid bare or not; and the fissure, whether apparently or not. . . . But if the bone is laid bare of flesh, one must attend and try to find out what even is not obvious to the sight, and discover whether the bone be broken and contused, or only contused; and if, when there is an indentation in the bone, whether contusion or fracture, or both be joined to it; and if the bone has sustained any of these injuries, we must give issue to the blood by perforating the bone with a small trepan.

  That might be the answer, he thought. And if he were able to relieve the girl by letting out an accumulation of blood inside her skull, he would not only be saving her from death but would be preventing a misunderstanding among the people in the city about Paul’s ability to heal and cast out demons. It was worth trying, he decided, but first he would have to talk to Paul and Silas about it. Fortunately he knew where they were preaching, and as he approached the crowd around Paul, he saw Silas and Timothy at the edge of it and went up to them.

  Silas was an older man, even older than Paul, quiet in manner, but intelligent and capable, and well suited to balance the mercurial temperament of the apostle. He had taken the place of Barnabas in many ways, although he was not so nearly the equal of Paul as Barnabas had been. As he came up to Silas and touched him on the arm, Luke heard Paul saying to the crowd, “Many of you saw yesterday how the power of Jesus drove out the devil from the slave girl who told fortunes. Even so He has power to drive the evil of sin from your hearts if you will listen and believe in Him.”

  “Is anything wrong, Luke?” Silas asked. “You seem disturbed.”

  “The slave girl had a demon cast out, but she still has convulsions,” Luke reported in a low voice. “Her owners beat her and the convulsions returned.”

  “Could it be the beating that brought them back?”

  “I think so,” Luke admitted. “But the people would never believe that Paul cured her if they knew of it.”

  Silas looked at him keenly. “This is serious,” he said. “Is there anything you can do for her?”

  “I might be able to cure her,” Luke said, “by drilling a small hole into her skull with a trepan to let out any blood which may have accumulated there.”

  “The girl is a slave,” Silas reminded him. “Could you do anything to her without her owners’ permission?”

  “The law recognizes the right of a physician to treat slaves in order to save life,” Luke explained. “And with the injury from the beating, her life is definitely in danger.”

  “We must speak to Paul,” Silas said then. “He will be finished in a short while.”

  When Paul was free, they all went to the house of Lydia. The slave girl was in an almost continual convulsion now; her condition had definitely grown worse in the past few hours.

  “The evil spirit has returned and taken possession of her again,” Paul said promptly. “There is no other explanation.”

  Luke pointed to the swelling over the girl’s temple. “The spasms can be explained by this injury.”

  “Jesus healed the woman of Magdala who had fits and was possessed of seven evil spirits,” Paul reminded him. “It could be the same with this poor girl.”

  “Then order the spirit to leave her again,” Luke said impatiently. “And if it does not, admit that I am right.”

  “Whether the spirit leaves her or not will be according to God’s will, not mine, Luke. And man does not challenge the will of God.”

  “But if you are not able to cure her,” Luke insisted, “will you give me leave to try my methods?”

  Paul smiled. “Christ has said we should not shun the physician. Perhaps in this instance God has chosen to release the evil spirit through the agency of your hands and not mine, Luke. You may try your plan.”

  “Then I must hasten,” Luke said somberly, “for she is worse than she was when I saw her first.” He looked around. “Timothy, you can help me, and Silas will direct the slaves who will hold her.”

  The preparations did not take long. A table was brought in from the kitchen, and Luke showed the slaves how to hold the girl upon it, with her head turned to one side so that he could work in the region of the left temple. He shaved a wide circle of hair from her head and washed the scalp carefully. Then he arranged the instruments he would use on a small table beside her head. A freshly-honed scalpel went first, then the trepans, small, rounded, burrlike drills turned by a short handle that fitted into the palm of his hand. Beside these Luke placed pads of the washed wool which Hippocrates recommended for dressing wounds, a mixture of wine and oil for washing the wound, and a bowl of hot tar with which to fill it when he was finished. Military surgeons had long recognized the value of the wine-oil mixture and also the tar in treating war wounds, and Luke judged that they would be equally effective in those made with the scalpel. In a brazier beside the table two irons soon glowed red-hot, with tongs beside them by which they could be handled to sear the wound in case the bleeding could not be controlled.

  Timothy’s face was white, but his mouth was set in determination, and Luke felt sure he would come through all right. To put him at ease Luke began to talk about the opinions of Hippocrates on the treatment of wounds.

  “Did Hippocrates perform surgery?” Timothy asked in surprise. “I thought he lived five hundred years ago.”

  “People have been trepanning skulls for many thousands of years,” Luke explained. “There was a royal skull opener in Egypt before the time of your Jewish prophet Moses. It was his duty to trepan the skull of Pharaoh when he lay dying to let his soul escape. Men have drilled the skull for epilepsy a
nd injuries, and sometimes to let out what they thought were devils.”

  “Then maybe Paul is right.” Timothy was unwilling to admit that his mentor could ever be wrong. “Perhaps the devil inside her may escape through the opening you plan to make.”

  Luke smiled. “I think you will soon see the nature of the devil which causes her trouble, Timothy.” He picked up the scalpel. “Are you ready?”

  Timothy nodded. His fingers gripped tightly the pad of washed wool which Luke had shown him how to use in sponging the blood away from the wound. Luke set the blade on the swollen skin and cut through the scalp for about two inches, forcing the blade down until he felt it strike the bone. The girl moaned and tried to twist away from the pain, but the slaves held her in position. Removing the blade, Luke pressed the washed wool tightly into the wound in order to close the cut blood vessels by pressure until the clotting of the blood could stop them from bleeding.

  Timothy’s eyes were wide with interest now. “Why does she not bleed to death?” he asked.

  “The pressure will control bleeding,” Luke explained. When he removed the wool pad a few minutes later, he was pleased to see that there was only a slight flow of blood from the wound.

  “Will you use the iron?”

  “No, I think not.”

  Timothy drew a long breath of relief.

  “I am going to use the trepan now,” Luke told him, “so keep the wound clear of blood for me.”

  Timothy pressed the wool gingerly against the wound, flinching visibly as the warm blood soaking it touched his fingers. When he drew the pad away Luke studied the bone revealed in the depth of the wound. He could see a jagged line crossing the bone in the wound now and realized that he was right about the injury. There appeared to be what Hippocrates called a “fissure” of the bone here, and undoubtedly a severe contusion or bruise of the tissues both inside and outside the skull—ample reason for the hemorrhage he felt sure was lying just under this bony layer.