Chapter 150: Abdominal Surgery [1]
I also needed hemorrhoid surgery, but that had been postponed for now. Yeah, I knew. Hemorrhoids really hurt. It was painful. But…
“Yeah, well… it’s not like you can avoid it. But are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure. I received almost twenty bodies from Jémel.”
“That many people are dying?”
“If you complain of stomach pain, there’s nothing they can do, right?”
“Nothing at all. They bleed you, give you mercury… You know, some hospitals even give morphine right away.”
“And then you die?”
“Yeah… well, some live, but…”
“Most people in serious pain die.”
“Oh, that’s right. I almost died too.”
Now, listen to this conversation. Still not getting it? Then keep listening.
“Okay, so what… we open the abdomen. If there’s something, we remove it. If not, then… well, they’re going to die anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Then we need to choose patients carefully.”
At that moment, I thought, yes, the director was still the director. Choosing patients carefully was just another way of saying we needed to apply proper surgical indications. And he was not wrong.
“Only patients who won’t be a problem.”
But then, the director said the next part with the kind of smile you would expect from a villain in a cheap novel. I thought he was joking until I turned and saw Liston nodding along.
“That’s how it should be. Because we’re still not certain.”
“As I gain experience, I’ll try it with regular patients too. But right now, I’m uncomfortable. It’s unfamiliar territory.”
“You’re under Anesthesia, so I hear you can take your time? I’ll need more practice though…”
“Fine. You have my permission. But for now, only touch the patients I designate. There are plenty of patients here who are considered troublemakers at other hospitals anyway.”
“Yes, sir.”
Honestly, this felt more like two villains plotting than doctors planning a surgery. You might wonder if that made sense, but this was nineteenth-century London. There really were people in this world whose deaths caused no ripples. How many of them could expect a decent life in this fast-growing industrial city, where the future was just a dream?
They’re just a burden on the hospital…
There were not any truly “healthy” people among the homeless. But they did not start out that way. Most were injured on the job and then cast aside by employers. They ended up drifting, untreated, until they died, whether from neglect, illness, or being sold to body suppliers.
But people like that shouldn’t just die.
Moments like this reminded me I was still a person from the twenty-first century. Back home, we believed in basic human rights. But here? Sure, they talked about “natural rights,” but those were for people of a certain class. Everyone else was not even seen as human.
“Huh?”
After that grim conversation, I chased after Liston, who clearly looked ready to kill someone, medically speaking.
“What is it now?”
“That ‘boat’ you mentioned earlier.”
“What about it? Don’t get all old-fashioned on me. If you’re going to lecture me about morals, forget it. Medicine… you may not realize it, but once Anesthesia wears off, everything changes. I truly believe most diseases can be handled by our surgeons, not by those quack doctors.”
Ugh. Was Liston in “light mode” again? Could he not just pick barbarian or gentleman? It was exhausting.
No, no.
As a surgeon myself, I could not deny that his words hit home. But if he was right, and I was right too, then…
We’ll end up building a tower of corpses.
If you were going to open up someone’s abdomen, you had to disinfect properly. That was a basic realization. But how long would it take for that to become common knowledge? How many would die before then, without anyone knowing why? They would just keep blaming Miasma or whatever.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t operate.”
“Oh? I knew you’d agree! You’re more enterprising than anyone I know. Then let’s move forward together. If my little brother’s on board, I’m in.”
“But we need to be careful.”
“Deliberately?”
Where did I even start teaching someone like this? It was hard teaching people who thought they knew everything but actually knew nothing. Fortunately, I had been through that before.
“Yes. You mentioned earlier that some patients have a swollen appendix, and some don’t.”
“Exactly. So I plan to separate them and try it.”
Wait. Are you seriously opening someone’s abdomen just to take a look?
I had to hold myself back. I was afraid the answer might actually be yes. And if it was, what could I even say?
“Wouldn’t it be possible to tell ahead of time, at least a little?”
“How?”
“Symptoms. Things like that.”
“They all say their stomach hurts. There’s no difference. I didn’t even check for more than that. Haha.”
Haha? Really? Just a stomachache was a stomachache? These really were the dark ages. Appendicitis could happen anytime, but the people who should be diagnosing it did not even try to understand what it was.
This was basically Russian roulette.
“Wouldn’t it matter where the pain starts, or where it hurts most?”
“Oh? Like what Jémel says? That quack says if the pain is in the upper stomach, you’ll probably vomit, so he makes them vomit early. You believe that?”
Did I believe that? Sure, vomiting made sense if it was upper gastric pain. The stomach was up there. But forcing someone to vomit just because? That was a whole different kind of nonsense.
“I’m not saying vomiting is helpful, but… if the pain is in the upper stomach, isn’t vomiting more likely?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where the stomach is?”
“Oh right, there is an upper stomach.”
For a moment, I wanted to stop correcting him and just die. If every time I died I went back two hundred years, I might prefer the ancient world over this mess.
“No, I mean inside there.”
“Inside? Ah… yeah. When we dissect… there’s a stomach in there. Got it. Hmm, stomachache, huh…”
Still, there was no guarantee this all ended well. I did not even know why I was reincarnated or why I was living this second life. Maybe it was to fix all the needless deaths that happened during the “advancement” of medicine.
Anyway, I tried again.
“Then wouldn’t it hurt around the appendix if that’s where the problem is?”
“Hm. That does make sense. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To the Internal Medicine ward. That’s where all the stomachaches are, right? If we find a sick one, we’ll open them up.”
That quickly? Just like that?
Of course, with me by his side, things would not go terribly wrong. I mean, I was a professor. Still was, technically. In the twenty-first century, you would get sued for even attempting this.
“Now?”
“You know how many people Jémel has already killed? That ward has the highest corpse count.”
“True.”
Jémel, Blundell, both of them probably accounted for more dead bodies than the average war. The thought made my chest tighten.
“Alright. Let’s go.”
“As expected of you! You’re so refreshing!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Truly my brother! Hahaha!”
I followed Liston to the Internal Medicine clinic. Like the surgical ward, it was its own kind of hell.
“Ugh…”
“Help me…”
“Please…”
Even just peeking through the door, I could see how bad it was. So much blood loss. How were these people still alive? In the twenty-first century, we donated four hundred milliliters. These people looked like they had lost a whole liter.
“This is the place?”
I followed Liston into the stomachache ward. As expected, it was hell. Every kind of medieval treatment was being attempted.
“Huh? What are you doing here?”
Jémel spotted us. Of course he did. He had the best position. The others probably noticed too, but they were too scared of Liston to say anything.
“I’m here to see some patients with stomachaches.”
“Why? You suddenly interested in Internal Medicine?”
“Nope. I’m doing abdominal surgery.”
“What?! Are you insane? You open the abdomen, people die.”
Jémel looked deadly serious. And he was not wrong. People did die. But that was because I was not here.
“If you guys had been treating them properly, I wouldn’t have come.”
“You’re arguing with someone who’s been working hard here?”
“Some patients are going to die anyway. Some have already been told by the director not to expect further treatment.”
“Uh… well…”
“They can’t pay. There’s no other way.”
“That’s…”
Mammonism. That was what this era really was. If you did not have money or status, you were barely considered human. Jémel backed off, no longer defending his own earlier concern about people dying.
And so, we were brought to four people who had been abandoned and left to die.
Should I say I’m lucky?
Maybe. Because they did not have money, they were spared Bloodletting or mercury poisoning. They just stayed sick. And maybe, in this era, that was the best possible outcome.
“Okay, let’s examine them.”
“Yeah.”
And with that, Liston and I got to work.