The Cole Trilogy

The Cole Trilogy follows three physicians from the same family across nearly a thousand years of medical and social change. The Physician begins in eleventh-century England and Persia, where Rob Cole crosses religious and cultural boundaries to acquire formal medical training. Shaman moves the family story to nineteenth-century frontier Illinois, bringing Western medicine into contact with Sauk knowledge and the upheaval of the American Civil War. Matters of Choice concludes the sequence in late twentieth-century Massachusetts through Roberta Cole’s struggle with professional ambition, rural practice and reproductive medicine.

Each novel centres on a different generation and can be read independently, but together they examine the responsibilities inherited alongside the Cole family’s unusual sensitivity to approaching death. The trilogy contrasts changing medical institutions and technologies with questions that remain constant: how knowledge should be used, what a physician owes a patient, and how personal conviction survives pressure from religion, war, prejudice and professional authority.