The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

This historical saga follows a family of healers across centuries, from eleventh-century London to modern-day Boston. In The Physician, an orphan named Robert Cole in Dark Ages London becomes a swindler but possesses an acute sensitivity to impending death. Yearning to become a healer, he travels to Persia to study medicine at Arab madrassas—the only authentic medical schools of the time. By claiming to be Jewish, he studies under Avicenna, the world's most renowned physician. His journey and love for a woman who competes with his devotion to medicine form the core of this narrative. In Shaman, Dr. Robert Judson Cole, a nineteenth-century descendant, emigrates from Scotland through antebellum Boston to frontier Illinois. There he befriends remnants of the Sauk tribe and learns native remedies that complement his classical medical training. He marries a settler woman he saved from illness, and the family faces the upheaval of the Civil War. In Matters of Choice, Roberta Jeanne d'Arc Cole, the latest first-born descendant, is a Boston hospital physician and abortion clinic worker. Her gender and clinic work cost her a hospital promotion, her marriage fails, and she retreats to her farmhouse in western Massachusetts. The story explores her fight for women's reproductive rights alongside her own maternal yearning.