Cayabyab, Natasha Alaine E.

BSN III-D4 January 22, 2018

“The Physician,” based on a Noah Gordon novel, fits neatly within this historical fiction tradition. It’s about an
11th century English barber’s assistant (Tom Payne) who, upon hearing that real medicine is being practiced
and taught in the Islamic East, sets out to study there. In pre-Norman England, illnesses are referred to as “the
sight sickness” (cataracts) or “the side sickness” (appendicitis). The workings of the human body weren’t
understood. There were no doctors or surgeons, none outside of the royal courts, anyway. Young Rob loses his
mother to illness and takes up with the drunken, wench-chasing traveling barber (Stellan Skarsgard) who failed
to save her. The Barber is all about sales pitches, tooth pulling and cauterized amputations. What animates the
film from time to time is the very clear message that a religion that lacks curiosity or critical thinking is
worthless, and of course religion in the Middle Ages — even more so than today — was never very fond of
those who thought outside the box, a point Galileo Galilei would acknowledge. And yet The Physician doesn’t
declare all-out war on religion, as a more activist production like Alejandro Amenábar’s insightful and angry
2010 film Agora set out to do, which presented the destruction of the Library of Alexandria by the savage
hordes of Christians who refuted any claims about the universe, no matter how great the science or the scientific
minds behind them, that were not contained in the Bible. Plus ça change. The Physician covers a lot of distance
but ends up a wobbly mess with too much on its plate, as it seeks to inform us about glorious tradition of
medicine in the Orient while Europe’s fixation on Christian beliefs led to the rejection of cures for treatable
diseases. All three Abrahamic religions’ idea of the body as a temple also meant that it could not be opened up
to learn more, leading to strange ideas about the way the body works. In a long-awaited scene that is terribly
underwhelming, a body is cut open and miraculously the individual doing this immediately understands how all
the pieces fit together and quickly figures out what someone actually died from, as opposed to the conventional
grasp of human biology.