Chapter 195: Hygiene Obsession [4]
Within a short time, the classroom became so disastrous that even empty words could not pretend it was fine. On one side, a sulfur fire was burning. On the other, hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid were furiously eating through the floor.
Is this hell?
It really looked like a depiction of hell. But since we were real men of the nineteenth century, we managed to ignore it for a while. Whatever the case, the sulfur fire seemed as if it would burn out soon anyway. Of course, that did not stop a barrage of questions.
“Alfred, what were you thinking when you brought sulfur in here?”
“I heard they used it in ancient Egypt.”
“Egypt? That uncivilized—”
The question trailed off awkwardly. Who were we, as British, to call ancient Egypt uncivilized? Even to the Romans, Egypt’s ruins were ancient. Their brilliant civilization deserved respect. Still, fire and brimstone were not the same thing. This was hazardous gas.
I improved half of the hellscape by tossing the remaining sulfur into the fountain outside. You might think I had dirtied the fountain, but frankly, that fountain could not get much worse than it already was.
Chiik—!
Something started making a worrisome hissing noise, but we had more important matters at hand. I turned back to the plates containing mercury, phenol, and iodine solutions. Depending on the results of this experiment, or rather, on how I explained them, our hospital might start applying mercury directly to patients.
Stop it. I have to stop it somehow…
Looking again, phenol might be acceptable. It was strong, almost like bleach, but at least it was still used for disinfection in modern times. Not directly on people, but still.
But mercury… that’s out of the question.
Mercury would definitely go down in future textbooks as a medical crime.
The atrocities committed by Kim Taepyeong, a shaman from the East, and his associates.
They might even name the resulting illness “London Disease” instead of Minamata. My heart pounded as I waited. Then Liston, being the most impatient among us, stepped forward.
“Alright, hand me the microscope.”
Meanwhile, the artist continued sketching miasmas, undeterred by the hellscape around him. He was surprisingly good at it. It was not even a modern microscope. It had to be used with one eye, it was not stabilized, and it was hard to keep a steady image, yet he persisted. He must have had his reasons.
“Yes, here.”
Taking the microscope from the artist, Liston bent down to examine the mercury plate.
“Hmm.”
He frowned slightly. That was a bad sign.
“What’s wrong?”
Blundell, impatient as well, took the microscope and examined the plate. His face darkened with the same ambiguous expression. I peeked through the eyepiece.
Ah… I see.
I could not see anything.
It’s the mercury. It’s obscuring everything. Maybe it killed everything. Or maybe it just blocked the view.
If there were pathogens that could survive mercury and still infect humans, it would be Doomsday. But I feigned ignorance.
“This… is hard to evaluate. The mercury is blocking the view. You can’t see the miasma at all.”
“Ah…”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Mercury… Damn.”
Everyone looked visibly disappointed. It seemed they had really hoped to apply mercury directly to human skin. In fact, we had already done that.
Come to think of it… Killian. Is that man still alive?
I would never forget the sight of that big, rough sailor bawling like a child as we washed him with mercury.
But I pressed on.
“Besides, mercury is expensive, isn’t it? Either the hospital would go bankrupt, or the patients would. Probably both.”
“Oh… that’s true.”
“I didn’t even think about the price.”
“Ah…”
Joseph, the one who had brought the mercury, looked down in shame. With that, mercury was eliminated. Now it was down to just two: carbolic acid and iodine.
I knew the right answer, of course.
Iodine.
But I could not say that outright.
Worst case… I’ll experiment. Just apply it to a patient and see what happens.
Neither should kill anyone outright. The main difference would be pain and tissue damage.
“Let’s take a look. Oh—”
“Oh, oh?”
“Hmm. Coal tar is pretty effective, huh?”
We all leaned in to examine the phenol plate. The miasma had clearly diminished. The artist immediately began sketching the scene as Liston tapped him excitedly on the shoulder. It was easy to see the effect because the miasma faded along the areas soaked in phenol.
“Hmm.”
“Iodine looks good too.”
“Really not bad.”
“This is why people call it red medicine.”
It was iodine’s turn. And yes, its miasma was gone too. That solution was truly potent.
We still used povidone-iodine in the twenty-first century, after all.
Wait… Why do I remember it as povidone, not iodine?
Maybe it had been reformulated. Improved. That meant it must have been used widely. Probably not too dangerous. Povidone was a miracle disinfectant. It did not sting much and caused little tissue damage. On bare skin, it was about the safest thing you could use.
“Okay then, we’ll go with these two for now.”
The experiment, disguised as a head-to-head trial, came to a natural end without me needing to push. I knew it was a crude method. But…
Edward Jenner would have been called a mad scientist by twenty-first-century standards.
That hero of the eighteenth century had developed the first vaccine by scraping cowpox fluid from a woman and injecting it into an eight-year-old. Two months later, he injected smallpox pus into the same boy, and the child lived. He repeated this for months, even though no theory proved the process worked. Even now, we still did not fully understand why his method succeeded. It was not until the twentieth century that we discovered cowpox and smallpox viruses were genetically similar.
Still, that kind of experimentation wouldn’t fly now. Ethics… There’s too much we know that we didn’t back then. But people are dying.
So in the end, it was far better to apply phenol or iodine and kill the miasma, or pathogens, than to operate in filth.
“I can’t just stand around here. Let’s go.”
“Huh? Where?”
I did not expect things to move this fast. But this was Liston. He strode off and entered Jemel’s clinic.
The scene inside was as chaotic as ever: patients screaming of stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, blood. And not a single procedure had been done cleanly.
“Ugh.”
Liston only sighed.
Pain was meant to be treated. Welcome to hell, Liston. Welcome to the nineteenth century.
“This place is a mess…”
Still, he did not raise his voice in another doctor’s office.
“Well, some patients do get better this way… I just don’t know.”
It was not about courtesy. He still had some lingering belief in traditional treatments: bloodletting, emetics, and purging. Surgeons were not trained in internal medicine, after all. Calling such things “treatment” would offend any modern internist, but what could we do?
“Over here.”
We walked deeper into a corner of the ward. There, patients who could not pay were left unattended.
“Before we start, how many of them have died?”
Liston asked this in front of patients who were still alive and conscious. It was a completely insensitive question, but utterly normal for this era. Death lurked behind every diagnosis. Most of these people had already half-given up by the time they walked in. No one flinched.
“Altogether… about forty percent?”
“They weren’t dead when I saw them last time, right?”
A forty percent mortality rate was no small number, but I nodded grimly.
If you cut without disinfecting… What do you expect?
I had used lime chloride where I operated, but only during surgeries I personally oversaw. Who knew what Liston had done in his earlier procedures? Probably cut straight in. My surgeries had around twenty percent mortality. His? Over sixty percent.
Still, I stayed quiet, not wanting to dampen the hopeful air.
“Well, let’s see if we can do better this time. Now…”
Liston briskly disinfected his hands and began moving through the patients. He licked his lips in anticipation, like a man at market eyeing fresh produce. The patients picked up on it. They flinched.
“Lie down, now.”
“Uh… Me?”
“Yes. Lie down. Right now.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
Liston began pressing on abdomens. Some patients did not seem to understand what was happening.
“Ugh—ugh!”
Others winced in pain. Liston grinned wide.
“Hehe.”
“Wh-what is it?”
Appendicitis. That was what he was checking for. If so, surgery was needed. Which meant survival was possible.
Had they gone to Jemel? They would have been bled dry and sent straight to the grave or the dissection table. But the patients did not know that. All they saw was a large, smirking man looming over them like death itself.
“Help me!”
“If you want to live, you need money… Oh wait, you weren’t asking us. Let’s get started.”
There was no help coming. Jemel glanced over at the noise, but once he saw these were the patients who could not pay, he turned away. The others did not even look.
“I’m trying to save you, so don’t panic.”
“Ha! Save me, huh? You, you’re Liston! And that man next to you, he’s T. P. Young! You’re both doing dissection shows! AAAHHHH!”
“Brother?”
“Too loud.”
Should I say it was a relief?
The patient soon quieted down.