Chapter 155: Now We Have to Disinfect More... [1]
Okay, I had to admit it.
Liston... I had no choice now but to acknowledge that this barbarian was a genius barbarian.
“Well done. Really.”
“Hehe. Was it similar?”
“Yes. What can I say... It was almost the same.”
The first time, sure, he had been a little clumsy. That was not really Liston’s fault. It was more about the difference in hand size. Those hands of his, better suited for butchery than surgery, could not enter the peritoneum through the kind of incision I normally used.
“As expected, the cross—”
“No, no. Just hold on a little longer.”
These uncivilized bastards had once again forgotten to use inches and would have happily added more than ten centimeters to the incision. Thankfully, my excellent intuition stopped them. I had already measured out seven centimeters. Adding another ten? That would have been the surgical equivalent of tearing the ship apart.
Of course, there were procedures, like Caesarean Sections, that required large incisions. But not appendectomies. That would have been far beyond excessive.
“Can I do it like this?”
“Oh... Yes. Did you find it?”
“Okay. Now I tie it like this, right?”
“Yes, the one inside. You don’t want Miasma leaking out.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll do it.”
In any case, there were no real crises. Surprisingly, things went smoothly. He really did have surgical talent. Even with limited and distorted anatomical knowledge, it felt like he could visualize everything in three dimensions and follow instructions precisely. Otherwise, there was no way he could have removed the appendix through such a small incision with so little experience.
Hmm.
I returned to the lab. I had told the students to draw and document today’s surgery, and Liston had gone off to work on his own. I was alone again.
“Whew...”
We had operated on three patients today.
Three abdominal surgeries.
How many of them would survive?
It was pitiful, how excited I had been about the surgeries, only to come crashing back to reality.
The biggest problem is the lack of disinfection.
I had to find a disinfectant. But first, I had to convince them that disinfection was necessary. Even now, other than my students, almost no one boiled or properly cleaned their surgical tools. The only reason anyone did it at all was because Dr. Liston had made shiny, polished instruments seem fashionable. Otherwise, no one would bother.
If only I were Liston, I could just order them to wipe things down...
I thought this several times a day.
I wished I were Liston. If I were, I would crush a few doctors with my fists... or slice them up with the famous Liston knife.
No, no. I was a doctor, not a barbarian. I needed rational persuasion, not violence.
I was tired of this nonsense about Miasma.
To do that, I needed to show them bacteria.
I needed a microscope.
Back in Upton, and even in my hometown, I had one. My uncle was rich. He would buy any novelty that caught his eye. But what I had then could barely be called a microscope. Maybe five-times magnification at most. It was more of a toy, really. Useless for anything serious.
“We need better microscopes... Madam...”
I never imagined being a doctor would make me feel this helpless. People thought chemists could just whip up medicine. But microscopes? What field even covered that? Physics? Optics? I used microscopes plenty in pathology, but I had never learned how they worked.
Ha.
I sighed, then remembered anesthesia gas. These lunatics had discovered it and spent seventy years using it for parties. If that was possible, then maybe microscopes were not far off. Thankfully, I was a professor at a university full of knowledge, and the library was my next best option.
Microscope... microscope...
I searched and finally found a book.
Unfortunately, it was old. It must have been nearly a hundred years old. It smelled musty and was crumbling at the edges, clearly discarded and forgotten.
A microscope... from a hundred years ago? Is this even a microscope?
My uncle’s microscope had been weak, sure. But this?
Were they just using a telescope and calling it a microscope?
I opened the book without much hope. But then, there it was.
A diagram of a microscope.
Tiny. Barely the size of a thumb. Nothing like the compound microscopes I knew.
According to the text, it had been developed in the 1600s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch textile merchant.
A fabric dealer? Really?
What kind of microscope could a man like that invent almost two hundred years ago?
Ha...
I felt humiliated.
But I did not close the book. This was the only book I had. Sure, I could go out tomorrow and try to find more, but not tonight. Tonight, I would cling to this absurd little thing.
Then I read something that made me freeze.
“Boasted magnification of over two hundred times.”
Two hundred times?!
The microscope I used in medical school maxed out around four hundred times. My memory was fuzzy, but two hundred times was more than enough to see bacteria.
That’s enough. That’s all I need. Just enough to see the bacteria!
Maybe it was a lie. The microscope certainly did not look impressive. But if it was true, then—
Shff.
I began turning the pages carefully, my heart pounding. What had once looked like garbage now felt like a hidden treasure. Most of the book was vague grumbling about how difficult things were, but then another name appeared.
Robert Hooke.
Captain Hook?
I thought that blankly.
Then came a detailed account of his achievements. He had observed cork under a microscope and found that it was made of tiny honeycomb-like structures. He named those structures “cells.”
Cells.
These people already knew something.
They knew, but they were ignoring it.
Ugh.
I glanced around the library. Back in my day, students packed the libraries. Even as a professor, we were always buried in books. But in this nineteenth-century world, it was different. People read, but hands-on practice seemed to take precedence over theory. Anatomy, dissection, and clinical medicine were what they focused on.
Maybe that was why no one bothered to explore what they already knew.
Leeuwenhoek...
As I read on, cursing the ignorance of the nineteenth century, Leeuwenhoek’s name appeared again. The man had apparently looked at rainwater under his microscope.
Rainwater? What did he even see in there?
Then came the sentence that hit me like a punch.
“Observed tiny living creatures never seen before.”
This was it.
This was the moment.
Before this, people believed insects were the smallest living beings. But Leeuwenhoek had discovered that was wrong. He had seen living organisms invisible to the naked eye, simply out of curiosity.
Bacteria.
He had seen bacteria.
And he had not kept it to himself, either. He had reported it to the Royal Society. Robert Hooke had verified it under his own microscope.
This happened in the 1600s.
Two centuries ago.
“You fucking bastards...”
And yet we were still clinging to Miasma?
No.
No. This was not a joke.
I was about to explode in anger, then remembered that Dr. Liston would be one of the targets. Miraculously, my rage subsided.
Getting mad would not help. If I walked in there waving this book around, they would just laugh and toss it aside. What I needed was evidence. Visual, empirical evidence.
I needed a microscope.
It was not impossible. Even crude tools could show bacteria. Proving that bacteria caused disease would take more, but first things first.
Let’s get a microscope.
With that decision made, I went to the most approachable person I knew: Liston, who was busy reviewing the surgery I had led.
“Oh, welcome back. So this is how it went?”
“Ah... Yes. No, actually, this part was like this.”
“Ah, aha. Got it. Hmm... Why does this part look like that?”
He pointed at the appendix, that vaguely useless organ that still confused even twenty-first-century doctors. Some said it helped with immunity. Others said it was just there.
“I don’t know.”
“What? There’s something you don’t know? Haha!”
When I admitted my ignorance, he seemed oddly pleased. Then, as if remembering I had not come for small talk, he turned serious.
“Brother.”
“Hm? What is it?”
“Could you get me a microscope? A good one. High magnification.”
“A microscope?”
“Yes. With high magnification.”
“Hmm...”
Liston scratched his chin. His beard made a coarse rustling sound. Honestly, how could someone with a face like that be so intimidating?
As I was thinking this, Liston gave me a puzzled look.
“...Why that toy?”