Dear and Glorious Physician
Taylor Caldwell
Table of Contents
Dear and Glorious Physician
Publishing Information
Author Page
Books by Taylor Caldwell
Foreword
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Bibliography
Preview
Dear and Glorious Physician
by
Taylor Caldwell
Publishing Information
Dear and Glorious Physician
by Taylor Caldwell
Copyright © 1959
Copyright renewed
mobi digital edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published by eNet Press Inc.
16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034
Digitized in the United States of America in 2012
Revised 201208
www.enetpress.com
Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com
ISBN 978-1-61886-401-7
Author Page
Taylor Caldwell, christened Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell, was born in Manchester, England on September 7, 1900, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve! (although it remained unpublished until 1975). She continued to write prolifically, however, despite ill health.
Taylor Caldwell was also known by the pen names of Marcus Holland and Max Reiner as well as her married name of J. Miriam Reback. Her works include Dear and Glorious Physician, a novel detailing the exploits of Saint Luke, The Listener, written about a mysterious altruistic individual who lends an ear where it is needed, and Dynasty of Death, a saga about a family of munitions makers.
In 1918-1919, she served in the United States Navy Reserve. In 1919 she married William F. Combs. In 1920, they had a daughter, Mary (known as ‘Peggy’). From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York. In 1924, she went to work for the United States Department of Justice, as a member of the Board of Special Inquiry (an immigration tribunal) in Buffalo. In 1931 she graduated from the University of Buffalo, and also was divorced from William Combs.
Caldwell then married her second husband, Marcus Reback, a fellow Justice employee. She had a second child with Reback, a daughter Judith, in 1932. They were married for 40 years, until his death in 1971.
In 1934, she began to work on the novel Dynasty of Death, which she and Reback completed in collaboration. It was published in 1938 and became a best-seller. ‘Taylor Caldwell’ was presumed to be a man, and there was some public stir when the author was revealed to be a woman. Over the next 43 years, she published 42 more novels, many of them best-sellers. For instance, This Side of Innocence was the biggest fiction seller of 1946. Her works sold an estimated 30 million copies. She became wealthy, traveling to Europe and elsewhere, though she still lived near Buffalo.
Her books were big sellers right up to the end of her career. In 1979, she signed a two-novel deal for $3.9 million. During her career as a writer, she received several awards: The National League of American Pen Women gold medal (1948); The Buffalo Evening News Award (1949); The Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).
She was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society’s monthly journal American Opinion. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion.
Around 1970, she became interested in reincarnation. She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives. Supposedly, she agreed to be hypnotized and undergo ‘past-life regression’ to disprove reincarnation. According to Stearn’s book, The Search of a Soul - Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives (1973), Caldwell instead began to recall her own past lives - eleven in all, including one on the ‘lost continent’ of Lemuria.
In 1972, she married William Everett Stancell, a retired real estate developer, but divorced him in 1973. In 1978, she married William Robert Prestie, an eccentric Canadian 17 years her junior. This led to difficulties with her children. She had a long dispute with her daughter Judith over the estate of Judith’s father Marcus; in 1979, Judith committed suicide. Also in 1979, Caldwell suffered a stroke, which left her unable to speak, though she could still write. (She had been deaf since about 1965.) Her daughter Peggy accused Prestie of abusing and exploiting Caldwell, and there was a legal battle over her substantial assets.
She died of heart failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on August 30, 1985.
Books by Taylor Caldwell
1938 DYNASTY OF DEATH
1940 THE EAGLES GATHER
1941 THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: A Tale of the Rise of Genghis Khan
1941 TIME NO LONGER
1942 THE STRONG CITY
1943 THE ARM AND THE DARKNESS
1943 THE TURNBULLS
1944 THE FINAL HOUR
1945 THE WIDE HOUSE
1946 THIS SIDE OF INNOCENCE
1947 THERE WAS A TIME
1948 MELISSA
1949 LET LOVE COME LAST
1951 THE BALANCE WHEEL
1952 THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
1953 MAGGIE - HER MARRIAGE
1954 NEVER VICTORIOUS, NEVER DEFEATED
1955 YOUR SINS AND MINE
1956 TENDER VICTORY
1957 THE SOUND OF THUNDER
1959 DEAR AND GLORIOUS PHYSICIAN
1960 THE LISTENER
1961 A PROLOGUE TO LOVE
1963 GRANDMOTHER AND THE PRIESTS
1963 THE LATE CLARA BEAME
1965
A PILLAR OF IRON
1965 WICKED ANGEL
1966 NO ONE HEARS BUT HIM
1967 DIALOGUES WITH THE DEVIL
1968 TESTIMONY OF TWO MEN
1970 GREAT LION OF GOD
1971 ON GROWING UP TOUGH
1972 CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS
1973 TO LOOK AND PASS
1974 GLORY AND THE LIGHTNING
1975 ROMANCE OF ATLANTIS (with Jess Stearn)
1976 CEREMONY OF THE INNOCENT
1977 I, JUDAS (with Jess Stearn)
1978 BRIGHT FLOWS THE RIVER
1980 ANSWER AS A MAN
Foreword
This book has been forty-six years in the writing. The first version was written when I was twelve years old, the second when I was twenty-two, the third when I was twenty-six, and all through those years work did not cease on this book.
The last version began five years ago. It was impossible to complete, as the other versions were impossible to complete, until my husband and I visited the Holy Land in 1956, and until my husband could give me the information for the last third of the book, and other assistance.
From my early childhood Lucanus, or Luke, the great Apostle, has obsessed my mind. He was the only Apostle who was not a Jew. He never saw Christ. All that is written in his eloquent but restrained Gospel he acquired from hearsay, from witnesses, from the Mother of Christ, from disciples, and from the Apostles. His first visit to Israel took place almost a year after the Crucifixion.
Yet he became one of the greatest of the Apostles. Like Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, he believed that Our Lord came not only to the Jews but to the Gentiles, also. He had much in common with Paul, because Paul too had never seen the Christ. Each had had an individual revelation. These two men had difficulty with the original Apostles because the latter stubbornly believed for a considerable time that Our Lord was incarnated, and died, only for the salvation of the Jews, even after Pentacost.
Why has St. Luke always obsessed me, and why have I always loved him from childhood? I do not know. I can only quote Friedrich Nietzsche on this matter: “One hears — one does not seek; one does not ask who gives — I have never had any choice about it.”
This book is only indirectly about Our Lord. No novel, no historical book, can convey the story of His life so well as the Holy Bible. So the story of Lucanus, or St. Luke, is the story of every man’s pilgrimage through despair and life-darkness, through suffering and anguish, through bitterness and sorrow, through doubt and cynicism, through rebellion and hopelessness to the feet and the understanding of God. This search for God and the final revelation are the only meaning in life for men. Without this search and revelation man lives only as an animal, without comfort and wisdom, and his life is futile, no matter his station or power or birth.
A priest, who helped us write this book, said of St. Luke, “He was Our Lady’s first troubadour.” Only to Luke did Mary reveal the Magnificat, which contains the noblest words in any literature. He loved her above all the women he had ever loved.
My husband and I have read literally over a thousand books about Luke and his times, and a bibliography is included at the end of this novel for anyone who wishes to do further reading on these matters. If the world of Luke sounds astoundingly modern to any reader, with modern implications, it is a fact.
This book may not be the best in the world, but it was written with love and devotion for our fellow men, and so it is finally given into your hands, for it concerns all mankind.
Almost all the events and background of St. Luke’s earlier life, manhood, and seeking, also his family and the name of his adopted father, are authentic. It should always be remembered that St. Luke was, first of all, a great physician.
When I was twelve years old I found a large book written by a nun who then lived in Antioch, containing many of the legends about St. Luke, which will not be found in historical books about him nor in the Bible. She related the legends and some obscure traditions about him, including the many miracles, at first unknown to him, which he accomplished before he even went to the Holy Land. Some of these legends are from Egypt, some from Greece. They are included in this novel about him. He did not know at that time that he was one of the chosen of God, nor that he would attain sainthood.
The mighty and splendid Babylonian Empire (or Chaldea) is not familiar to many readers, nor its studies in medicine and its medical treatments by the priest-physicians, and its science — all of which the Egyptians and the Greeks inherited. The Babylonian scientists understood magnetic forces, and used them. These things were contained in thousands of volumes in the wonderful University of Alexandria, which was burned by the Emperor Justinian several centuries later in an excess of misguided zeal. Modern medicine and science are beginning to rediscover these things. The present age is poorer for Justinian’s fervor. Had Babylonian science and medicine come down to us unbroken, our knowledge of the world and man would be vastly more advanced than it is at present. We have not as yet discovered how the Babylonians lighted their sails at night by a “cold fire, more brilliant than the moon,” and how they illuminated their temples by this same cold fire. Apparently they had some way of utilizing electricity unknown to us, and not in our present clumsy manner. It is reported that they used “land vessels” without horses, lighted at night, and attaining great speed. (See the Book of Daniel.) It is also reported that they used strange “stones” or a kind of ore for the cure of cancer. They were expert in the employment of hypnotism, in psychosomatic medicine. Abraham, a resident of the city of Ur, in Babylonia, brought this treatment of psychosomatic medicine to the Jews, who used it through all the centuries. The Magi, ‘the Wise Men of the East’, who brought gifts to the Infant Jesus, were Babylonians, though that nation long before had suffered a great decline.
Where authorities differ about some of the incidents in this book, or the background, I have used the major decisions. The Gospel of St. Luke is used exclusively here, so much that appears in the Gospels of Sts. Matthew, Mark and John is not included.
I wish, at this time, to thank Dr. George E. Slotkin of Eggertsville, N.Y., famous urologist and professor emeritus, School of Medicine, Buffalo, N.Y., for his invaluable assistance in the field of ancient as well as modern medicine.
Taylor Caldwell
Part One
“Surely God chooses His servants at birth, or perhaps even before birth.”
— Epictetus
Chapter One
Lucanus was never sure whether he liked or disliked his father. He was only certain that he pitied him. Simple men of no pretensions could be admired. Wise men could be honored. But his father was not simple or wise, though he considered himself the latter.
Bookkeepers and record-gatherers had their important place in life, especially if they were diligent and knew that they had a value as bookkeepers and record-gatherers, and did not imply that they possessed larger gifts. It was not good when they spoke of ‘lesser men’ in highly cultured and superficial tones. But the mother of Lucanus smiled so tenderly and so mercifully when her husband intoned his ridiculous prejudices that the light of her compassion mollified her son.
There was the matter of Aeneas bathing his hands in goat’s milk each morning and night, rubbing the rich fluid into every wrinkle and crevice and joint carefully. By the time he was ten years old Lucanus understood that his father was not merely trying to soften and whiten his hands but was attempting to obliterate the scars of earlier servitude. This irritated Lucanus, for even then he knew that work of any kind was not degrading unless it became so in the mind of the worker. But when Aeneas shook his wet hands delicately to dry them in the soft Syrian air, Lucanus could see the disfigured areas on the palms, and the long ugly cicatrice on the back of the slender right hand, and his pity came to him in a flood of vague love. But his real understanding was still childish.
Aeneas was at his best when, just before the evening meal, he would pour the customary libation to th
e gods. Lucanus always watched him then with a veneration that was without words. His father’s voice, so thin and meager and lofty, as a rule, became humble and hesitant. He had gratitude that the gods had freed him, had made possible this small and pleasant house in its gardens of palms and flowers and fruit trees, had lifted him from the dust and had granted him authority over other men. But the most solemn event, to Lucanus, was when Aeneas refilled the wine cup and, with even more reverence, poured out the red liquid slowly and carefully, and said with almost inaudible softness, “To the Unknown God.”
