Chapter 190: More Advanced Anatomy [2]
“My, your life?”
The Montpellier man took a step back. Smart move. If you treated what Dr. Liston said lightly, you were begging for trouble.
“Yeah, well, I like money too.”
“That…”
The Montpellier man looked genuinely stunned that someone would make a bet in the middle of a medical contest. Honestly, it was strange to me that competition in medicine even existed. Was this not the era where people loved settling disputes with duels and drama? The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Edmond Dantès, came out in the 1840s. It had been thirty years since then. Even now, people still occasionally threw gloves down to start a duel, didn’t they?
“Okay! Good night! Try it! Do it for money!”
“You understand that life is worthless, but you don’t realize how terrifying money can be.”
Liston chuckled and quietly set down the rubber gloves he had been fidgeting with. If he had slapped me with those gloves, I might have died in a duel. But since it seemed more likely I would die of infection, I quietly praised his restraint.
Meanwhile, the Montpellier man kept chattering on, completely unaware that he had just walked away from the brink of death.
“Haha, the London man… A hillbilly from an island country dares to surpass French medicine?”
London, was it? I was pretty sure that man went back early. The police chief there was friends with Liston. But if I pulled a stunt like that here, I would have to fight off ten police officers just to escape. Strangely, I did not think I would get caught. And as for what would happen to me or the others, well, I figured Liston would make it out alive.
“Hehe. Let’s begin. Let’s start with the arms.”
“Yes, good!”
Liston looked at me and grinned. A truly terrible grin. It was the kind of expression people probably made right before committing murder. But now I understood. It was just his happy face.
“Cadet. Let’s try it.”
“You didn’t say how much money.”
That particular face, the one just before doing something awful, I had seen it before. But now? I was practically a nineteenth-century Brit myself. Without realizing it, I felt a smile spreading across my face.
“Haha, I left it vague on purpose. That way, no matter how much you take, it won’t seem strange.”
“Ah, hahaha! That bastard must live nearby.”
“Yes! You’ve matured a lot.”
I was seriously considering robbery.
Whoop whoop.
I could not stop laughing. More than anything, I loved dissection. And these corpses were in surprisingly good condition. Since they were not preserved with formalin, it actually felt like surgery. A bit soft, maybe, but considering they had been treated with anesthesia and a muscle relaxant, it almost resembled twenty-first-century surgical conditions.
“You do the left arm. I’ll take the right.”
“Okay then… Are there still blood vessels?”
“Then I’ll focus on preserving the nerves.”
“Yes.”
The dissection skills of the Liston-Taepyeong duo were now considered the best in London, at least among those who knew us. Not that we had many chances to perform publicly yet. For now, it was mostly between us and the medical students and doctors who came to observe. I was curious to see how a first-time viewer would react.
“Huh…”
“Did you see that? The muscles are being separated, bit by bit.”
“How much experience do you have…?”
“No, it’s not that they do it a lot. It’s just very systematic. I think I understand it completely.”
“Well, that’s Liston, isn’t it? They say he amputates more than ten limbs a day.”
“Ah… So that’s the legendary ‘Sword Saint Liston.’”
To summarize: everyone was astonished.
And rightfully so. Not long after I started, the skin was already peeling back, exposing the muscles. Of course, muscles were organized into outer and inner layers, with major nerves and vessels in between, so I had to carefully remove those first.
Before going further, I paused to explain.
Muscle names? I made them up as I went. But I had already agreed with Liston that we would abandon the nineteenth-century habit of naming things after discoverers, which only made learning harder. Instead, we would use descriptive terms based on shape and function, something people could actually understand.
“Well, so… Aren’t you listening to me?”
I did not really know the formal anatomical method. Liston handled that part. I just named things, and he cut accordingly.
“This here is the deltoid. It looks like a triangle, doesn’t it? It attaches here on the side of the upper arm. It’s probably the first muscle involved when lifting your arm like this.”
But I avoided making absolute claims about motor function. I explained through analogy. Really, I was just describing it correctly without sounding too cocky.
“And this, this muscle in the chest…”
I figured pointing to my own chest might be awkward, so I used Liston as an anatomical model. His chest muscles were so defined that even if no one fully understood, they nodded along enthusiastically.
“If you look closely here—”
I explained while simultaneously cutting the skin and lifting it to reveal the chest muscles beneath. They were so lean that the structure looked textbook-perfect.
“This upper portion connects to the clavicle, and the lower portion attaches near the sternum. Technically, it’s the same muscle, but the function might vary slightly. The shape probably differs depending on what kind of movements the person made while alive. It’s not necessarily some innate anatomical difference, as some claim, but rather the result of behavior.”
At this time, anatomy was in an explosive period of discovery. Corpses were stolen and dissected. It was bound to lead somewhere. But with poor statistical tools and limited knowledge, they often mistook things that looked different as being different, and vice versa.
I knew it would take another hundred and fifty years before anatomy truly matured. So I wanted to push the process forward, even just a little.
“Ah… So if you exercise more, your muscles grow?”
“Sure… That makes sense.”
“But then there’s just one problem. Why do people still die?”
I had been afraid I was rushing them, but not anymore. Now they were coming up with theories like “exercise builds muscle.” Sure, that was obvious in the twenty-first century, but not now. They did not even know about the roles of hormones, nutrition, or sleep. The idea that repeated use strengthened things led to wild notions, like maybe moving parts could live forever.
“Well, that’s just my personal opinion.”
“Yes, well… your skills are ghostlike. Amazing.”
If I tried to correct all their misunderstandings, I would have to lecture for days. Who had time for that? Not me, not Blundell, not Liston. Not just to fix one Paguette man’s head.
“Now, look down here. These two origin points attach to the forearm. This is the biceps. ‘Bi’ means two heads. You can tell from the shape that it’s probably involved in arm flexion.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Now compare it to this one, the triceps. Three heads. So it does the opposite, right?”
“Right. I guess so.”
I also pointed out the brachialis muscle underneath the biceps. It originated from the humerus and connected to the lower bone. It was another flexor, not especially strong, but likely responsible for initiating motion. Then I introduced the coracobrachialis, which was hard enough to pronounce in Korean, let alone here. Most people did not even know it existed.
Small and obscure, but real.
“Oh… You can separate it like this?”
“Huh. That’s incredible.”
The admiration continued.
Meanwhile, Liston was carefully isolating the nerves, a painstaking job, but he was absurdly skilled. I used to perform surgeries with a clumsy Liston knife. Now, give me a scalpel and I could dance.
“And further down, there’s more muscle here…”
The upper arm muscles simply flexed and extended. Nothing fancy. But the forearm? That was where it became interesting. Wrists, fingers, and two bones to complicate things.
“See this? It runs from the tip of the humerus down to the opposite bone in the forearm.”
“Ah. Yeah, it’s very small…”
“What do you think it does?”
“Hmm…”
“I’d say it helps rotate the arm. If you know the origin and insertion, you can guess the function.”
“Dividing the beginning and end is…”
“It probably initiates movement toward the midline of the body. That’s how I see it.”
“Hmm.”
I explained everything in anatomical detail. Many nodded in agreement. Others did not. The ones pretending to understand were ironically the ones leading the field.
“If you look at electrical experiments, it’s all random—”
Screw you. Especially that man. Sure, electricity was tested on dead bodies. No, I would not try it on a living person.
“You mean the frog?”
“Yes, the frog.”
Frogs were ideal for this kind of primitive electrical testing. Human application? We were not there yet. There was a reason everything still ran on dim gaslight.
“Are frogs and humans the same?”
Technically yes, but I decided to be a little irritable.
“Is that so? That could be true.”
It was all so damn confusing.
“And this muscle here, it’s broad, with two insertion points. That implies two functions: flexing the wrist and rotating the hand.”
“Oh, that’s an interesting theory. Definitely more plausible.”
Fortunately, the frog-loving humanist shut up, and the rest just kept admiring the demonstration. That alone was more than enough to impress the Montpellier man.
Could someone who did not know basic muscle anatomy achieve the same results as someone who did? I was better at surgery. But we still had a long road ahead.
“Now, let me take over.”
Liston stepped forward. Nerves dangled like spider silk from the body.