Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medicus | 1986 | Noah Gordon | N/A |
| 2 | The Physician | 1986 | Noah Gordon | Buy |
| 3 | Shaman | 1992 | Noah Gordon | Buy |
| 4 | Xamã | 1992 | Noah Gordon | N/A |
| 5 | Choices / Matters of Choice | 1995 | Noah Gordon | Buy |
| 6 | La doctora Cole | 1995 | Noah Gordon | N/A |
The Cole Family Trilogy is Noah Gordon’s best-known work, tracing a family of physicians across centuries. The Physician (1986) starts the saga with Rob Cole, an 11th-century English orphan who travels to Persia disguised as a Jew to study under the great physician Ibn Sina. The book was a moderate success in the US but became a phenomenon in Europe, selling millions of copies in Germany and Spain and eventually being adapted into a film in 2013. Medicus is an alternate edition of the same novel.
Shaman (1992) moves the story to 19th-century Illinois, where Rob Cole’s descendant Robert Jeremy Cole becomes a frontier doctor and learns healing practices from the local Sauk people. Choices, also published as Matters of Choice (1995), brings the Cole family into the present day with a female physician practicing in rural New England. The foreign-language editions Xama and La doctora Cole are translations of Shaman and Choices, respectively.
The trilogy works as a history of medicine told through the lens of one family. Each book stands on its own as historical fiction, but reading all three shows how the impulse to heal gets passed down through generations, shaped by whatever era the Coles happen to live in.