Chapter 182: The Great Disaster [4]
One week. No, ten days.
Since my initial estimate had been off, our ordeal dragged on longer than expected. Of course, that did not mean the crisis was truly over. It had simply entered a lull. Patients were still trickling in, slowly.
This kind of thing… it’s not because someone is doing a good job.
If this were twenty-first-century Korea, something like this would not have escalated in the first place. We had septic systems. All water was treated, purified, and disinfected. More than that, our water supply and sewage systems were completely separate. But even if something went wrong, teams would begin epidemiological investigations and enforce quarantines within hours.
But here? They did not have the administrative systems for that. Or maybe they simply did not understand the need. The result was chaos. Based on rough numbers, admittedly underreported, about twenty thousand people had gone to Paris hospitals with diarrhea over the past three weeks.
The population here is around six hundred thousand, right?
That meant over five percent of the population had been affected. And cholera was not even a respiratory disease. It spread through contaminated water. More precisely, it was a fecal-oral infection. For a disease with that route of transmission to spread this quickly and widely, the scale was staggering.
“Whew.”
“I really thought I was going to collapse.”
We were completely drained. Treating that many patients over such a short period had wiped us out. Even the resilient Dr. Liston collapsed the moment he had a drink. It was not alcohol this time, but opium tincture. Still, considering his size, it normally would not affect him so quickly. Given his condition, however, it made sense.
“Haaah…”
And me? I was not any better. I felt like I could fall over at any moment. The one silver lining, the thing that kept me going, was that everyone in our group had survived.
Unlike the others.
Other doctors caught it because they did not wash their hands, wore no masks, or thought they would be fine despite a little splash here and there. Many of them died. That was despite us doing everything we could to treat them, mainly through rehydration. But even that grew difficult toward the end. Filtering and distilling enough water was becoming nearly impossible. Some late-arriving patients had to be given alcohol instead of water.
Already dehydrated, and then they’re given alcohol? No wonder they died.
Trying to explain alcohol metabolism or dehydration to nineteenth-century people was a lost cause. When we ran out of water, we sometimes gave low-alcohol solutions.
Fuck…
“Will London be okay?”
Our work was wrapping up, and we would be returning soon. But that did not mean we felt triumphant. People were still dying. We were just too exhausted to express much of anything. Each of us was slumped against a wall, drinking whatever was at hand.
Blundell, too. I could not tell if it was the drink or genuine concern that had him looking so grim.
“London?”
He said it out of the blue, but in my daze, I answered reflexively.
“Yeah. This time, I mean… What should I say? Hygiene? I learned how important hygiene really is…”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Hygiene.
Hah. Ha ha.
To hear these men speak the word “hygiene” with such reverence was truly a sight. I nearly burst out laughing. Of course, doing so would have made me look like a lunatic, so I kept it to myself.
“What about our London? Sure, Paris is a mess, but the Thames…”
Blundell trailed off.
“Oh, my… Fuck…”
He cursed under his breath. It was warranted. The Thames was disgusting. Really disgusting. No salmon had been caught there this year. The fact that people even tried was shocking to me. But in this era, people did not understand that toxins could accumulate in an animal’s body. So it made sense, in its own way.
Blundell kept muttering curses.
“There’s no guarantee we won’t have the same outbreak. We’ve just been lucky so far. London water is always filthy… When I think of the miasma in it, it makes me want to vomit.”
“Didn’t you wake up earlier because you had to poop?”
“No… If I drank opium tincture, I’d be out cold. You’re fifty years old. You passed out drunk on cognac and shit yourself in your sleep. I had to clean it up and hide it from Pyeong…”
“You bastard! Why would I drink with my eyes closed?! No, no! You’re lying! I didn’t even have cholera!”
“Right. That’s why you stole a pair of Pierre’s pants, huh?”
Liston, drunk on a mixture of opium and alcohol, was laughing like an idiot. If he had added violence to that mix, we might have had even more deaths in Paris. Luckily, Liston was never one for physical fights. At that moment, he lay there with a blanket wrapped around him, eyes closed, grinning like a child.
Marley Blundell would probably be mortified if he remembered this…
“Oh, you’re all here.”
Just then, Pierre entered the room. He looked worn down, which was unsurprising, given that he had been suffering from diarrhea from the beginning. Still, he held on, driven by a fierce determination to protect his hometown. Today, he had been pacing anxiously.
“Mm—!”
Blundell suddenly clamped his hand over Liston’s mouth and turned to face Pierre.
“It’s about the meeting with Montpellier this evening,” Pierre said. “As Dr. Pyeong requested, we’ve compiled the number of admitted patients and deaths.”
He had come with statistical data. That in itself was not surprising. It was the kind of thing hospitals should maintain. But with so many people dying, no one had kept proper track. Thanks to me, we had created a simple system. Montpellier, of course, had nothing.
“And as Dr. Pyeong suggested, I also gathered information from the cemeteries. But please note, it is very rough…”
“You buried multiple people in one grave, didn’t you?”
“What? How did you know?”
How?
Coffins were not easy to make, and people were dying nonstop. Unless you had an industrial production line, you would run out fast. Judging by the ox carts I saw, that much was obvious.
Still, they were human beings. How could they do that?
“Wouldn’t it be fair to say that the corpses of the poor are treated like animal carcasses?”
I once worked with the London Police while advising them with Dr. Liston. At the time, I overheard someone handling corpses say something similar. I had expected outrage, but to my surprise, the officer in charge only nodded. Back then, I thought London was cruel. But now I understood. It was not just London. It was the spirit of the times.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Yes, many people died. They didn’t even ask for names. Anyway, please rest for now. I’ll call for you again later.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I should be thanking you, Dr. Pyeong.”
He kept saying “Pyeong, Pyeong,” almost as if he were teasing me, but the respectful bow he gave, with his head lowered completely, told me otherwise.
As Pierre suggested, we rested a little before heading out to meet the representatives from the University of Montpellier.
The streets were eerily quiet. The beggars who used to scream for money, the orphans who pickpocketed the beggars and got beaten, and the beggars who kidnapped children to beg on their behalf were all gone.
They were probably the first to die…
There was a reason people said the corpses of the poor were like animal carcasses. These people, the urban poor, did not die only when cholera struck. Death was always with them. And in places like London, poor people’s bodies were often buried in mass graves, even when they were murder victims.
“It’s nice that the streets are quiet.”
Unlike me, the coachman did not give it much thought. He had stayed in a relatively safe place, boiling our water. From his perspective, the silence was a blessing. The streets were easier to drive through, the air was cleaner, and the roads were clearer. Even the Seine looked a little better, probably because the amount of sewage had decreased after so many deaths.
I did not respond. I only stared quietly out the window at the stillness of post-disaster Paris, feeling a weight settle in my chest.
We arrived at the police station.
Why a police station? Because if we met at a hospital, things would have gone sideways. In this era, people debated through persuasion, but physical force was fair game. So naturally, they requested that the meeting be held at the station. After all, there were sword masters and Qing gang members here. It made sense.
“Now…”
Upon entering, we were guided to the right. On the left stood Korai, Montpellier’s patron saint of Hippocratic medicine. They called him a master, but the more I saw him, the more irritated I became. I could already imagine the nonsense he would start spouting.
Well… It’s fine.
We had Liston. He was fully refreshed after several hours of sleep. Logic was on our side. And Liston had the charisma to sway people even when logic did not.
“First, let us begin with the data submitted by the Royal Academy of Surgery,” said a man. “Please note that I remain neutral between both parties.”
The speaker was not a police officer, but someone even more significant.
That’s François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, a successful politician.
The coachman whispered it to me. Guizot’s stature was enough to keep everyone quiet.
But only for a moment.
“According to reports from the Royal Academy and hospitals using similar methods, the mortality rate is around ten percent. By contrast… Montpellier reports over sixty percent fatalities. Any rebuttal?”
Before Guizot could even finish, Korai leapt forward.
“It’s falsified! Ten percent? From cholera? That’s impossible!”