The Physician

  “Until the third day his urine was clear. Light yellow in color. On the morning of the third day his urine showed blood, and that afternoon he passed six urinary calculi, four like grains of sand and two of them stones the size of small peas. Since then he has had no further pain and his urine is clear, but he will take no food.”

  Ibn Sina frowned. “What have you offered him?”

  The student appeared puzzled. “The usual fare. Pilah of several sorts. Hens’ eggs. Mutton, onions, bread … He will touch nothing. His bowels have ceased to function, his pulse is fainter, and he grows progressively weak.”

  Ibn Sina nodded and looked at them. “What ails him, then?”

  Another of the medical clerks gathered his courage. “I think, Master, that his intestines have become twisted, blocking the passage of food through his body. Sensing this, he will allow no nourishment to enter his mouth.”

  “Thank you, Fadil ibn Parviz,” Ibn Sina said with courtesy. “But in such an injury the patient will eat, only to cast up his food.” He waited. When no other observations were forthcoming, he approached the man on the pallet.

  “Amahl,” he said, “I am Husayn the Physician, son of Abd-Ullah who was son of al-Hasan who was son of Ali who was son of Sina. These are my friends and would be thine. Where are you from?”

  “The village of Shaini, Master,” the man whispered.

  “Ah, a man of Fars! I have spent happy days in Fars. The dates of the oasis in Shaini are large and sweet, is it not so?”

  Tears formed in Amahl’s eyes, and he nodded dumbly.

  “Askari, go now and fetch our friend dates and a bowl of warm milk.”

  In a short time the food was brought, and the physicians and the students watched as the man began to eat the fruit hungrily.

  “Slowly, Amahl. Slowly, my friend,” Ibn Sina warned. “Askari, you shall see to the change in our friend’s diet.”

  “Yes, Master,” the Jew said as they walked away.

  “This must be remembered about the sick people in our care. They come to us but they do not become us, and very often they do not eat what we eat. Lions do not relish hay because they visit the kine.

  “Dwellers in the desert subsist mainly on sour curds and similar preparations of milk. The inhabitants of the Dar-ul-Maraz eat rice and dry foods. The Khorasanis want only soup thickened with flour. The Indians eat peas, pulse, oil, and hot spices. The people of Transoxiania take wine and meat, especially horse flesh. The people of Fars and Arabistan eat mainly dates. The Bedouins are accustomed to meat, camel’s milk, and locusts. The people of Gurgan, the Georgians, the Armenians, and the Europeans are wont to take spirits with meals and to eat the flesh of cows and pigs.”

  Ibn Sina looked flintily at the men gathered about him. “We terrify them, young masters. Ofttimes we cannot save them and sometimes our treatment kills them. Let us not starve them as well.”

  The Chief of Princes walked away from them, his hands behind his back.

  Next morning, in a small amphitheater with rising tiers of stone seats, Rob attended his first lecture at the madrassa. Out of nervousness he was early, and he was seated alone in the fourth row when half a dozen clerks entered together.

  At first they paid him no attention. From their conversation it was evident that one of them, Fadil ibn Parviz, had been notified he would be examined for his fitness to become a physician, and his fellow clerks were reacting with envious gibes.

  “Only one week before your examination, Fadil?” said a short, plump clerk. “You will piss green with fear, I think!”

  “Shut your fat face, Abbas Sefi, you Jew’s nose, you Christian’s prick! You needn’t be afraid of the examination, for you’ll be a clerk even longer than Karim Harun,” Fadil said, and they all laughed.

  “Salaam, what have we here?” Fadil said, noticing Rob for the first time. “What’s your name, Dhimmi?”

  “Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “Ah, of jail fame! The Jew barber-surgeon of the Shah’s calaat. You’ll find it takes more than a royal decree to make a physician.”

  The hall was filling. Mirdin Askari was picking his way up the stone tiers to a vacant place, and Fadil called to him.

  “Askari! Here’s another Hebrew arrived to be made into a leech. You’ll soon quite outnumber us.”

  Askari looked over at them coolly, disregarding Fadil as he might have ignored a bothersome insect.

  Further comment was cut off by the arrival of the lecturer, a worried-looking teacher of philosophy named Sayyid Sa’di.

  Rob received an inkling of what he had assumed by fighting to become a medical clerk, for Sayyid looked about the room and noted a face that was strange to him.

  “You, Dhimmi, what is your name?”

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin, master.”

  “Jesse ben Benjamin, tell us how Aristotle described the relationship between the body and the spirit.” Rob shook his head.

  “It is in his work, On the Soul,” the lecturer said impatiently.

  “I don’t know On the Soul. I’ve never read Aristotle.”

  Sayyid Sa’di stared at him with concern. “You must begin to do so at once,” he said.

  Rob understood little that Sayyid Sa’di spoke about in his lecture.

  When the class was over and the amphitheater was emptying, he made his way to Mirdin Askari. “I bring you the best wishes of three men of Masqat, Reb Lonzano ben Ezra, Reb Loeb ben Kohen, and your cousin, Reb Aryeh Askari.”

  “Ah. Was their trip successful?”

  “I believe it was.”

  Mirdin nodded. “Good. You are a Jew from Europe, I hear. Well, Ispahan will seem strange to you, but most of us are from other places.” Their fellow medical clerks, he said, included fourteen Muslims from countries of the Eastern Caliphate, seven Muslims from the Western Caliphate, and five Eastern Jews.

  “I’m only the sixth Jewish clerk, then? I would have thought us more numerous, from what Fadil ibn Pardiz said.”

  “Oh, Fadil! Even one Jewish medical clerk would be too many to please Fadil. He’s an Ispahani. Ispahanis consider Persia the only civilized nation and Islam the only religion. When Muslims exchange insults, they call each other ‘Jew’ or ‘Christian.’ When they’re in a good mood, they consider it the soul of wit to call another Mohammedan ‘Dhimmi.’”

  Rob nodded, remembering that when the Shah had called him “Hebrew” people had laughed. “It makes you angry?”

  “It makes me work my mind and arse hard. So I can smile when I leave the Muslim clerks far behind me in the madrassa.” He looked at Rob curiously. “They say you’re a barber-surgeon. Is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t talk about it,” Mirdin said cautiously. “Persian physicians believe barber-surgeons to be …”

  “Less than admirable?”

  “They are not in favor.”

  “I don’t care what’s in favor. I make no apology for what I am.”

  He thought he saw a flicker of approval in Mirdin’s eyes, but if so it was gone in a moment.

  “Nor should you,” Mirdin said. He nodded coolly and made his way out of the amphitheater.

  A lesson in Islamic theology taught by a fat mullah named Abul Bakr was only slightly better than the philosophy class. The Qu’ran was divided into one hundred and fourteen chapters called suras. The suras varied in length from a few lines to several hundred verses, and to Rob’s dismay he learned he could not be graduated from the madrassa until he had memorized the important suras.

  During the next lecture, by a master surgeon named Abu Ubayd al-Juzjani, he was ordered to read Ten Treatises on the Eye by Hunayn. Al-Juzjani was small and swarthy and fearsome, with an unblinking stare and the disposition of a newly awakened bear. The rapid accumulation of assigned scholarly work chilled Rob, but he was interested in al-Juzjani’s lecture about the opacity that covered the eyes of so many people and robbed them of vision. “It is believed such blindness is caused by a pouring-out of corrupt hum
or into the eye,” al-Juzjani said. “For this reason early Persian physicians called the ailment nazul-i-ab, or ‘descent of water,’ which has been vulgarized into waterfall disease or cataract.”

  The surgeon said most cataracts began as a small spot in the lens that scarcely interfered with vision but gradually spread until the entire lens became milky white, causing blindness.

  Rob watched as al-Juzjani couched the eyes of a dead cat. Soon thereafter, his assistants passed among the clerks and distributed animal corpses so they might try the procedure on dogs and cats and even hens. Rob was given a brindle cur with a fixed stare, a permanent snarl, and no front paws. His hands were unsteady and he had no real idea of what to do. But he took courage from recalling how Merlin had rid Edgar Thorpe of his blindness because he had been taught this operation at this school, perhaps even in this very room.

  Suddenly al-Juzjani was leaning over him and peering at the eye of his dead dog. “Place your needle upon the spot at which you intend to couch and make a mark there,” he said sharply. “Then move the tip of the needle toward the outer angle of the eye, level with and slightly above the pupil. This would make the cataract sink below it. If you are operating on the right eye, you hold the needle in your left hand, and vice versa.”

  Rob followed the instructions, thinking of the men and women who had come behind his barber-surgeon’s screen through the years with opaque eyes, and for whom he had been able to do nothing.

  To hell with Aristotle and the Qu’ran! This was why he had made his way to Persia, he told himself exultantly.

  That afternoon he was among a group of clerks following al-Juzjani through the maristan like acolytes trailing a bishop. Al-Juzjani visited patients and taught and commented and questioned the students as he changed dressings and removed stitches. Rob saw that he was a surgeon of skill and diversity; his patients in the hospital that day were recovering from cataract surgery, a crushed and amputated arm, the excision of buboes, circumcisions, and the closing of a wound in the face of a boy whose cheek had been perforated by a sharp stick.

  When al-Juzjani was through, Rob made the trip through the hospital again, this time behind Hakim Jalal-ul-Din, a bonesetter whose patients were rigged with complex systems of retractors, couplers, ropes, and pulleys that Rob regarded with awe.

  He had waited nervously to be called upon or questioned, but neither physician had acknowledged his existence. When Jalal was done, Rob aided the porters in feeding patients and cleaning up slops.

  He went in search of books when he was finished at the hospital. Copies of the Qu’ran could be found in ample number in the madrassa library, and he discovered On the Soul. But he learned that the single copy of Hunayn’s Ten Treatises on the Eye had been taken by someone else, and half a dozen students had applied before him to study the book.

  The keeper of the House of Wisdom was a kindly man named Yussuful-Gamal, a calligrapher who spent his spare time with quill and ink, making extra copies of books bought from Baghdad. “You have waited too long. Now it will be many weeks before Ten Treatises on the Eye will be available to you,” he said. “When a book is advised by a lecturer you must hurry to me at once or others will get here first.”

  Rob nodded wearily. He carried the two books home, stopping along the way at the Jewish market to buy a lamp and oil from a spare woman with a strong jaw and gray eyes.

  “You’re the European?”

  “Yes.”

  She beamed. “We are neighbors. I am Hinda, wife of Tall Isak, three houses north of you. You must visit.”

  He thanked her and smiled, warmed.

  “For you, the lowest price. My finest price for a Jew who wormed a calaat out of that king!”

  At the inn of Salman the Lesser he stopped for a meal of pilah, but was dismayed when Salman brought two more neighbors to meet the Jew who had won the calaat. They were burly young men, stonecutters by trade—Chofni and Shemuel b’nai Chivi, sons of the widowed Nitka the Midwife, who lived at the end of his street. The brothers patted his back, bade him welcome, tried to buy him wine. “Tell us of the calaat, tell us of Europe!” Chofni cried.

  Their fellowship was tempting, but he escaped to the loneliness of his house. When he had tended the animals he read the Aristotle in the garden and found it difficult, for meaning eluded him and he was smitten by his ignorance.

  As darkness fell he moved indoors and lighted the lamp, and then he turned to the Qu’ran. The suras appeared to be arranged according to length, with the longest chapters first. But which were the important suras that must be memorized? He hadn’t an idea. And there were so many introductory passages; were they important?

  He was desperate and felt he must begin somewhere.

  Glory to God Most High, full of Grace and Mercy; He created All, including Man …

  He read the passages again and again, but before more than a few verses had been committed to memory, his heavy lids closed. Fully dressed, he sank into deep sleep on the lamplit floor, like a man seeking to escape a sore and vexatious wakefulness.

  40

  AN INVITATION

  Rob was awakened each morning by the rising sun glinting through his chamber’s narrow window, reflected golden off the tile roofs of Yehuddiyyeh’s crazily leaning houses. People appeared in the streets at daybreak, the men going to morning prayers in the synagogues, the women hurrying to tend stalls in the market or to shop early for the best produce of the day.

  In the house next door to the north lived a shoemaker named Yaakob ben Rashi, his wife Naoma, and their daughter Lea. The house to the south was occupied by a bread baker named Micah Halevi, his wife Yudit, and three small children, all females. Rob had lived in Yehuddiyyeh only a few days before Micah sent Yudit to Rob’s house to deliver a round, flat loaf for his breakfast, still warm and crisp from the oven. Everywhere he went in Yehuddiyyeh, people had a kind word for the foreign Jew who had won the calaat.

  He was less popular in the madrassa, where the Muslim students never called him by name and took open pleasure in addressing him as Dhimmi, and where even the Jewish students called him “European.”

  If his experience as a barber-surgeon wasn’t generally admired, it was still useful in the maristan, where within three days it was apparent that he could bandage, bleed, and set simple fractures with a skill equal to a graduate of the school. He was relieved of the chore of collecting slops and given duties that more directly involved the care of sick people, and that made his life a little more bearable.

  When he asked Abul Bakr which of the one hundred and fourteen suras of the Qu’ran were the important ones, he couldn’t get an answer. “All are important,” the fat mullah said. “Some are more important in the eyes of one scholar, others are more important to another scholar.”

  “But I can’t be graduated from this place unless I have memorized the important suras! If you don’t tell me which they are, how am I to know?”

  “Ah,” the theology lecturer said. “You must study Qu’ran, and Allah (exalted is He!) will reveal them.”

  He felt the weight of Mohammed on his back, the eyes of Allah on him always. Everywhere he turned in the school, there inescapably was Islam. A mullah sat in every class to make certain Allah (great and mighty is He!) was not profaned.

  Rob’s first class with Ibn Sina was an anatomy lesson at which they dissected a large pig, forbidden to Muslims as food but permitted for study.

  “The pig is a particularly good anatomy subject, because its internal organs are identical to man’s,” Ibn Sina said, deftly cutting away the skin.

  This one was full of tumors.

  “These smooth-surfaced growths are likely to cause no harm. But some have grown so fast … see, like these—” Ibn Sina said, tipping the heavy carcass so they could better observe, “—that clumps of flesh have crowded against one another like the sections in a head of cauliflower. The cauliflower tumors are deadly.”

  “Do they appear in humans?” Rob asked.

  “We do not
know.”

  “Couldn’t we look for them?”

  Now the room was silent, the other students contemptuous of the stranger and infidel devil, the assisting instructors watchful. The mullah who had slaughtered the pig had lifted his head from his prayer book.

  “It is written,” Ibn Sina said carefully, “that the dead shall rise and be greeted by the Prophet (may God bless him and greet him!), to live again. Against that day, their bodies must be unmutilated.”

  After a moment, Rob nodded. The mullah returned to his prayers, and Ibn Sina resumed his anatomy lesson.

  That afternoon Hakim Fadil ibn Parviz was in the maristan, wearing a physician’s red turban and receiving the congratulations of the medical clerks because he had passed the examination. Rob had no reason to like Fadil but he was excited and glad nevertheless, for any student’s success might one day be his own.

  Fadil and al-Juzjani were the physicians who made the rounds of patients that day, and Rob followed them along with four other clerks: Abbas Sefi, Omar Nivahend, Suleiman-al-Gamal, and Sabit bin Qurra. At the last moment al-Juzjani and Fadil were joined by Ibn Sina and Rob could feel the general heightening of nervousness, the small excitement that always occurred with the presence of the Chief Physician.

  Soon they came to the place for tumor patients. On the pallet closest to the entrance lay a still, hollow-eyed figure, and they paused well away from him. “Jesse ben Benjamin,” al-Juzjani said. “Tell us of this man.”

  “He is Ismail Ghazali. He doesn’t know his age but says he was born in Khur during the great spring floods there. I have been told that was thirty-four years ago.”

  Al-Juzjani nodded approvingly.

  “He has tumors in his neck, under his arms, and in his groin that cause him great pain. His father died of similar disease when Ismail Ghazali was a small boy. It agonizes him to urinate. When he does, his water is deep yellow with casts like small red threads. He cannot eat more than a few spoonfuls of gruel without vomiting, so he has been fed lightly and as often as he will accept nourishment.”

  “Have you bled him this day?” al-Juzjani asked.