The Physician 2013

Visually stunning movie about an English traveling barber called Robert who wishes to learn medicine from Avicenna, the renowned Early Medieval Muslim teacher. Against all odds, the Christian Englishman manages to do this --- but must hide his faith in order to do so. He defies traditional Christian, Islamic, and Jewish teaching by dissecting the dead in order to learn the reason for "side illness" --- appendicitis. And he figures out that plague is transmitted by parasitic fleas traveling on rats. All of this without learning a single word of Persian, and right before an extremist Muslim band sacks Isfahan and takes over. Robert also witnesses the suicide of Avicenna, and upon returning to England he introduces modern hospitals there.

The amount of anachronistic fairy tales inserted into this story is appalling. It makes it seem as if Avicenna was not responsible for the medical knowledge attributed to him, but was instead taught them by an Englishman --- thus reducing the place in history that Avicenna rightly deserves. And Avicenna died of all age, and most decidedly did not poison himself. And shall we talk about the medical insights of Robert the Englishman? He seems to have an understanding of modern medical knowledge --- culminating in the founding of his hospital --- that would make his trip to Muslim lands redundant.

Religion, too is given short shrift. Quite often it stands on the way of true scientific enlightenment. Christians, Muslims, and Jews are all shown as intolerant, unless they give way to the superior form of knowledge that is science. But this ignores the well-established facts that Avicenna was a devout Muslim, for instance, or that the inheritors of the Muslim science depicted in this book were very much devout Christians. And it is a fact that by the time of Jesus --- much more so by the 11th century --- the Jews had given up on stoning as a form of punishment for adultery.

Yes, the movie is stunning. But no, it is decidedly not history.