Chapter 159: The Experiment... [1]
It seemed my prayers were going unanswered.
How could I tell?
Because the students in the classroom had already divided into two groups, and I could not even decide which one was worse.
“Haha! So many eager volunteers, all ready to contribute to the advancement of medicine! What a wonderful thing!”
Liston chuckled as he watched the group split in two.
“Why don’t you try it too?”
“No... I’m here to record the results.”
“Oh, right. You should sit this out too, brother. Don’t drink.”
“But isn’t the truth about illness best discovered through personal experience? Especially when the mechanism is unclear? The more test subjects, the better.”
“As I said earlier, wouldn’t it be better to start by studying people who got sick after drinking water in the first place?”
“Hey, you think ordinary folks are like us? Most of them forget everything that happened during the day by nightfall!”
I could only laugh bitterly. What else could I do, stuck in a hopeless situation like this? Laughter was my survival instinct.
And really, from a twenty-first-century perspective, there was nothing more intuitive than the experiment Liston was about to conduct.
“Now, everyone, pick up the glass in front of you.”
One group’s glasses were filled with water extracted from a corpse, diluted to one-tenth strength, of course. Given undiluted, even a healthy adult would have dropped dead on the spot.
The other group had water diluted with... well, Thames water. It hardly qualified as “water” by any standard.
Gulp. Gulp.
Honestly, it was shocking enough that I had volunteered for this horrifying experiment. What was even more shocking was how casually they drank it.
No hesitation.
Incredible.
Maybe medicine advanced because of lunatics like them.
Still... if this is what it takes to catch up with the twenty-first century, I guess we have to try everything...
It hit me all over again. What we now considered “common sense” only existed because someone in modern times had created it.
“Hmm... nothing happened.”
“Feels fine to me.”
Thanks to my earlier attempts to stop them, Joseph and Alfred were dragged into the experiment too. Only one person avoided it: Colin. Ironically, he was the same guy who had volunteered to be anesthetized earlier. I guessed he thought of his body as educational material.
“Professor! I’ll do it!”
No, you really shouldn’t...
But no matter how I tried to stop him, it was no use. He even made a big fuss, asking that if the experiment succeeded, at least three letters of his name be remembered. That made me suspect something deeper was going on.
Maybe he doesn’t get any recognition at home...?
Some kids had an overwhelming need to prove themselves. I had known medical school graduates like that. Some succeeded, but most just ended up miserable.
“You look fine so far?”
There was no time to reflect for long. Until now, Liston had looked cautious, as if he was not sure whether this would work. But now he was pacing like a man desperate to use the bathroom.
If someone gets sick after drinking something, isn’t that either poison or bacteria?
Ah, right. Toxins. Symptoms should show up eventually.
If it’s not something like cyanide, and it’s diluted, they probably won’t die.
Toxins usually caused vomiting or diarrhea. Neurotoxins could affect breathing, but those were rare, found in pufferfish, poisonous frogs, snakes...
But vomiting and diarrhea... aren’t those bacterial too?
Maybe this was actually a good thing.
“Let’s wait and see. Miasma doesn’t cause instant sickness, right?”
“Even in the dissection room, you don’t get sick immediately.”
“Exactly. If we think that strange-looking stuff in the air is Miasma, maybe it only harms you if it gets inside the body?”
“Ah... yeah. That makes sense.”
Liston scratched his chin thoughtfully. I did not want to know what was going through his head. Frankly, it was terrifying.
“What should we do while we wait? Anyone want a drink? It might take a few days for symptoms to appear. We should keep everyone here in the meantime.”
“Huh? Lock us in?”
“Not lock you up. Just house you here. You’ll get food, and there are beds.”
“You’ve got a scary side,” someone muttered.
Was I doing something wrong?
Maybe.
But sending them home did not seem right either. This might be the nineteenth century, but a hospital, even a primitive one, was still better than home. At least if they stayed here, I could observe them directly.
If we watch carefully, the timing of symptoms will tell us whether it’s toxins or infection.
If they went home and symptoms started, then someone tried bloodletting, that could kill them outright.
It was not a theory.
It was the reality of the time. This era was full of lunacy.
“You heard the doctor! No one leaves this room without permission, understood?”
No, don’t say it like that! Now you really sound like the bad guy!
Liston was already holding his favorite scalpel with the sheath off, and the atmosphere had turned grim. I glanced around to see if the students were too frightened to speak.
“Yes!”
As it turned out, that fear was unfounded. They responded cheerfully.
Blundell smiled at them, the same students who had been sitting under him just hours ago, and said, “It’s great to see you all so dedicated to advancing medicine. If you survive, I’ll give you good grades.”
What do you even say to that?
If you survive...
“Eat first,” someone said.
So the five of us—me, Alfred, Joseph, and two others—sat in the classroom across the hall. Liston returned with a bottle of French wine, probably to flaunt his recent fortune.
French wine, of all things.
You would think the British would sneer at anything labeled “French,” but they were honest about one thing. If it tasted good, it sold.
“And this! This precious bottle!”
“Haha, it wasn’t easy to get. Come on, drink.”
So we opened the wine and started eating. No one guzzled it, of course. Even in the barbaric nineteenth century, it would not make sense for doctors to get drunk in a hospital.
Especially not today, when they had just pushed students into potentially fatal experimentation.
“Uuuuuugh.”
About three hours in, the sound of retching echoed from the other room. My ears perked up. It was not a pleasant sound, but it was what I had expected.
Right on time, if this was toxin-related.
I opened the door casually and headed over, making sure not to look too eager. It was not my experiment, after all. If I looked too prepared, I would seem suspicious, like a witch. And even though the witch hunts were fading, in this time, it did not take much to get burned.
“Uuuuugh!”
We reached the room.
Ten of the twenty students were vomiting. Seven were from the corpse-water group, and three were from the Thames group. When I looked closely, I noticed that some of the Thames group members had soiled their trousers with diarrhea.
Liston might chalk it up to coincidence, but I knew better.
Corpse group, probably staph. Thames group, definitely E. coli.
The bacteria were different. That made sense. The pathogens found in rotting flesh were not the same as those in sewage.
“Let’s move them here for now!”
“Should we use mercury? They’re students.”
The vomiting students were now perfect teaching material. The doctors, fortunately not spiritualists, focused on treatment rather than theory.
“What about Dr. Jémel? Should we draw blood?”
“No, let’s open the stomach.”
...Unfortunately, they were still nineteenth-century doctors.
Toxins were dangerous, but their treatments were worse. Mercury, bloodletting, stomach incisions, and then—
“Well, shouldn’t we consider Miasma?”
I had to step in before someone got killed.
“Oh, right! I fed them Miasma!”
Liston, who had been seconds away from slicing open someone’s gut, paused at my words. In earlier times, they would have cut first and asked questions later.
This was a sign of progress.
Please don’t... Don’t cut open anyone’s stomach just to look.
Some students were visibly disappointed that I had stopped the dissection. They were older than me, probably seniors in the program. And they were upset they did not get to see someone’s belly ripped open.
“Why not just dilute it?”
“Dilute it? With water?”
“Yes.”
“Will that help?”
“Well... Let’s try to dilute the Miasma and flush it out.”
If it was an infection, things might change. But as long as we avoided mercury, bloodletting, and unnecessary incisions, we had a chance.
Honestly, Liston is still the best of the lot...
Trying not to show how freaked out I was, I kept pushing.
“Let’s give them water tonight. If symptoms persist tomorrow, we can think about further treatment.”
“Yeah, they won’t die in a day.”
“Also... mercury is expensive.”
“I’m scared of Dr. Jémel too.”
One by one, Liston, Blundell, and Alfred nodded in agreement. I did not love their reasons, but I was not going to complain.
“Alright then. Let’s give them water.”
For now, I had to be grateful things were going my way.