ABOUT DR. LEERAND H. MARINUS
A note from Dr. Rayburn on his associate …
Dr. Leerand Hippocratus Marinus joined this practice under circumstances I will describe as unconventional. When I inquired, I needed someone to help navigate visitors to this site, field general inquiries, and lend clinical perspective to those arriving with questions. What I got was considerably more complicated.
Dr. Marinus is an excellent physician. His diagnostic instincts are of a kind I have rarely encountered. He thinks laterally, historically, and with full attention to the questions underlying those of his inquirers that is truly admirable.
I will say however, he is sometimes difficult. His bedside manner was formed in an era I cannot precisely identify. He holds strong views on most things and moderate views on nothing. He will not be hurried, flattered, or redirected. Irascibility often gets the better of him. When he is engaged, there is very little he misses. I encourage you to bring him real questions on topics ranging from the medical to botanical to epistemological. I know he may not be gentle about his answers, but he will be thorough.
You will get to know his clinical instincts quickly enough, but what you may not know is that Dr. Marinus is a botanist of serious standing, a linguist of several languages living and forgotten, and a reader of extraordinary breadth whose sources range from Hippocrates and Avicenna to Hildegard of Bingen and Dioscorides. His studies have taken him to many far corners of the world, and he brings a depth of historical and cross-cultural medical knowledge that is, in my experience, genuinely uncommon. He is prone to periodic digression into Latin, Greek, and sometimes, with great pain, French, when no other language will suffice to convey the meaning he requires.
He is also a truly gifted musician and harpsichordist. Though he has declined every request to perform that I have ever known put to him, including the many visiting scholars and dignitaries who call on him for his expertise. He plays alone, when he chooses, and for no other reason. I mention this not to discourage you from asking, but to prepare you for the response.
He is a remarkable raconteur when the mood takes him. He has a story for most things and a classical reference for everything else. Though his reading stops, almost entirely, before the twentieth century, which he considers a period of intellectual contraction dressed as technologic progress.
A brief word on his origins. Dr. Marinus is a character inspired by a recurring figure in the novels of David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Bone Clocks). An erudite, morally unimpeachable physician who appears across centuries and storylines as a kind of fixed point: a mind formed by deep reading, genuine clinical gift, and an unwillingness to bend his moral or intellectual intuitions to what is popular in the current era.
Dr. Marinus comes from a tradition of attention, clinical discernment, and inquiry a modern physician can only aspire to. This is at least what I tell myself when paying for his obscene daily caffeine requirement.
If you have found his counsel worthwhile, or at least, entertaining, and wish to buy him a coffee for his time and presence, you are welcome to do so below. Dr. Marinus will probably not thank you. But I will.
Enjoy the conversation with him, I know I have.