Pre-1980 story about man who can access alternate universes. References to a girl with a scar on her face, and Mithras [duplicate]

Question

Some years ago, I read on rec.arts.sf.written about a story (I think by Lafferty or Davidson) about a man who could access alternate universes - he can, for example, pick up a quarter from the return slot in a phone booth, then grab another quarter from a nearly identical universe, and another and another (and so on). From what I remember of the description of the story, the man meets on the street a woman with a scar or birthmark on her face, who is distraught because her father just collapsed from a heart attack. By accessing nearby universes, the man brings her father back to life, by accessing still-living heart cells from alternate healthier versions of the father from many, many different universes (so that he doesn't kill any of the alternates), and dissolve the scar by spreading it over enough alternate versions of the girl that none of them have more than a light freckling. But bringing the father back to life in public causes a mob scene, and the man flees to an alternate universe where instead of Christian symbols nearby, there's a statue of Mithras. Unfortunately, I can't find the original thread in r.a.s.f.w., but I don't think I imagined it. As I recall, the process of accessing alternate universes was referred to as "turning."

Answer 1

I think this is "What Rough Beast" by Damon Knight.

It was written in 1958, well before 1980.

The narrator has the ability to exchange things between worlds. He can use this trick to make money by (for example)

I reached into my pocket to where there could be a gold coin, and turned, and threw the coin on the table. Then I turned to where it would hit a different place, here, here or there and in a minute there was a pile of coins shining on the table cloth.

He cures a woman of a scar by turning each little bit of skin to a world where it was not scarred.

But when her father has a heart attack he swaps the whole man with one from a parallel world. He cannot just swap over little bits of a heart. The new man looks like her father but has a different history and he cannot send him back.

At the very end he reaches back into past and turns himself into a parallel universe.

I remembered I has seen in a book statues like these. It was a book about a god named Mithra of old times and these statues that I now saw were statues of Mithra the morning star.

These seems to be close to a reference to Mithras. So we have all the elements of the question.