A Radiant Green
“Hmm.”
“Hrmm.”
We laid out the spoils we had plundered—no, strike that, the items we had secured for purely academic research—across the lecture hall.
Paper, cloth, paint, wallpaper, soap, lampshades, toys, candles, fabric, cake ornaments, confections, dresses, artificial flowers... An absurd variety of goods stood lined in neat rows. Good lord. To think arsenic was being used in this many everyday products.
Looking at them all gathered together like this, I can kind of understand why they use it. Dammit. It really was gorgeous. The color possessed a brilliant, luminous luster—almost reminiscent of classical Goryeo celadon. The only difference was that Goryeo celadon was never associated with untimely demise, whereas this stuff was lethal poison.
Or am I mistaken...?
For a fleeting moment, seeing how widely it was used made me wonder if I had gotten it all wrong. After all, these people had eyes and working brains, didn't they? If folks were dropping like flies left and right, surely someone would have had second thoughts. Besides, this so-called Scheele’s green had been around for decades. Wouldn't the body count have been catastrophic?
No... wait, no.
The moment the Seine and the Thames crossed my mind, my head shook on its own. These lunatic bastards...
Strictly speaking, it wasn't entirely fair to place all the blame on them. Regardless of the cause, death lurked around every corner in this era. The casualty rate per square foot in this century was probably higher than in any other period of human history. Because of that, their attitude toward death was... what should I call it? Tolerance? Resignation? Whatever it was, their insensitivity was staggering.
"Look at this. What do you think of this gift for my nephew?"
To give an idea of how bad it was, not long ago Blundell had proudly shown off a gift for his nephew: a toy funeral play set, complete with miniature coffins. It was grotesquely realistic. If the casket were only scaled up a bit, you could have buried it straight into a London cemetery without anyone batting an eye.
"Please wash the body clean."
And that was hardly the only instance. There was one family where, after we washed their deceased child, they dressed the corpse in its Sunday best and posed it for a photograph. The younger sibling was seated right beside the dead child. All just to take a family portrait—one featuring their dead kin propped upright.
“There certainly is a lot of it,” Liston remarked.
“Tell me about it.”
Unlike my convoluted, existential brooding, Liston’s appraisal was stark and simple. Not that he was wrong. There was an obscene amount of it. Enough to make you wonder if the British had developed some bizarre arsenic fetish.
“If every single thing here contains arsenic... and if that arsenic is truly poisonous, what do you reckon happens?”
“People die.”
“Yet they aren't dying, are they?”
“We don't know that for sure.”
“Don't we? Well, I suppose we don't. But the shopkeepers handling these goods seemed perfectly sound.”
“From what I could tell, aside from the apothecary, none of them had been in business very long.”
“Hmm... that is true enough. Well then... should we go round up some people?”
Why on earth did his conclusion immediately leap to kidnapping human subjects? The tragic part was that I didn't even have a counterargument to offer. After all, what good was just arranging arsenic-laced goods on tables?
Or so I had thought at the time...
“Whoa...”
“It's gorgeous.”
“Good heavens... so luxurious.”
The hoard we had hauled in was the sort of treasure trove impossible to keep under wraps. It boasted green dresses and rolls of wallpaper that were currently sweeping London high society by storm, to say nothing of artisanal pastries you normally had to wait in long queues to buy. Rumors that the lecture hall was packed with all manner of exquisite green luxuries quickly drew swarms of onlookers—not just medical students, but scoundrels from other departments as well.
Crowd control? There was no need for that. Liston’s chilling declaration—"Touch my things and you die"—kept everyone at bay. A few dared to stretch their fingers close, but that was as far as anyone went.
“It’s late today,” Liston said. “Shall we bag some test subjects tomorrow?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
And so, leaving Colin behind to keep a casual eye on things, we headed home. Or rather, Liston did. Remembering that I had left something behind, I doubled back toward the lecture hall. And there...
“Uh—hey!”
Inside the closed lecture hall, I spotted a figure collapsed on the floor.
“Urp.”
He was vomiting. The symptoms were an exact match. Just like that patient.
“Oh, shit!” Cursing under my breath, I dragged the student out into the hallway. “Liston! Blundell!”
“Joseph! Alfred! Colin! Hey, Colin, where the hell are you?!”
I hollered for everyone within shouting distance, praying at least one of them would come running to assist.
“Ugh...”
Colin was the first to appear. His face looked ghastly pale.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you alright?”
“I... I threw up. Got terribly dizzy. Forgive me...”
Come to think of it... this kid had spent the longest time inside that room keeping watch over the goods.
“Dammit all! Get to the ward! Lie down right now!”
“Y-yes, Doctor.”
He must have been in truly awful shape. Normally, he would have insisted he was fine, determined to soldier on with nineteenth-century grit and sheer stubborn pride—ready to chew a handful of arsenic if it served the cause of medical progress. But the moment I ordered him to lie down, he scurried off without a word of protest.
“What is it? What happened?”
“What’s the matter?”
Were Joseph and Alfred in the middle of a dissection? They came sprinting over while peeling off their gloves. What was more, Joseph seemed to have developed an obsessive-compulsive quirk lately. Fortunately, it wasn't some strange neurosis, but an obsession with cleanliness.
“Aargh!”
“Urgh!”
Wincing in pain himself, he uncapped an iron flask—the kind usually reserved for liquor—and sloshed chlorinated lime solution generously over his own hands and Alfred’s. Well, using that instead of soap certainly got things sterile...
“Gah! You bastard!”
Me too?
“There is neither professor nor student when it comes to washing one’s hands,” Joseph declared flatly.
“R-right, quite so.”
When someone took it that far, getting angry felt petty. After all, the man was disinfecting his hands. He was desperate to banish the miasma. Berating someone who had achieved such monumental personal progress would hardly be proper conduct for a civilized man of the twenty-first century.
“So why did you call us?”
“Who is this fellow?”
“He collapsed inside the room.”
“Natural causes?”
“To the dissection theater?”
“He’s not dead yet!”
These lunatic bastards... Why were they so eager to kill off a living soul?
“Ah, he lives.”
“He’s vomiting. Shall we open up his abdomen?”
No, absolutely not. We are not slicing his belly open!
“It’s arsenic. Arsenic!”
“Arsenic? Ah... you did mention that everything inside was laced with arsenic.”
“Yes. It looks like acute poisoning. Ingesting arsenic causes vomiting, diarrhea, and profuse sweating. His body temperature is already dropping. If we leave him like this, he’ll die!”
“Well, we can't have that.”
After much scrambling, we dragged the patient into the infirmary ward. Colin, who was already lying in one of the beds, greeted us with a vacant, dazed expression.
“H-hello...”
“Just rest. When did your symptoms start?”
“About an hour after you left me to watch over the room, to be honest.”
“An hour?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“That’s unusually fast... What did you do? Did you ingest something else?”
“I felt a bit light-headed, so I took a dose of Fowler’s solution.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Treating arsenic toxicity by swigging down more arsenic... Truly an inspired stroke of nineteenth-century brilliance.
“Intravenous fluids!”
“Right, fluids.”
“We’ll need to prepare them first. Won’t take long.”
“I heard the shouting and came running,” Blundell chimed in, arriving out of breath. “Fluids, you say? Leave it to me.”
I had almost succumbed to despair at the sheer backwardness of nineteenth-century medicine, but watching these men spring into action the instant I shouted for IV fluids brought immense relief to my heart. Joseph, Alfred, and now Blundell, who had just joined the fray... Were they not all veterans of the Seine? Men who had literally halved the cholera death toll in Paris? Their sanitary habits had become second nature by now.
Boil the water. Distill it. Measure the salt and dissolve it.
To be completely honest, I couldn't even perform that task myself. Why? Because... why on earth were they still clinging so stubbornly to inches, grains, and pounds? I could never get used to their imperial nonsense.
“It’s ready.”
“The needles are thoroughly disinfected.”
“The scalpel as well!”
At any rate, thanks to the IV Avengers, I had in hand a freshly compounded batch of saline solution. The only issue was that freshly brewed fluids couldn't be infused straight into a vein. It was... scorching hot.
The inner lining of blood vessels wasn't anywhere near as tough as the lining of one’s mouth. Pumping this in right now would literally cook the veins from the inside out. But preparing it in advance wasn't an option either, since sterile preservation was impossible. We were in an era without refrigerators, let alone proper airtight containers.
“Hang in there a little longer,” I told Colin.
“Urgh... yes, sir. Urp.”
Until it cooled down, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and endure. Fortunately, Colin looked relatively stable. He was a hardy lad. He had lost his composure once when confronted with a bloated corpse, but honestly, anyone who didn't lose their mind at that sight would have had something wrong with them anyway.
“How are you holding up?” I asked the other fellow.
“Uhh...”
By contrast, the student who had collapsed was rapidly slipping out of consciousness.
“What on earth did you swallow?”
“T-thought it was... grass...”
“Grass?”
Did this idiot chew on the artificial flowers?! I wanted to interrogate him on what madness possessed him to graze on fabric flora, but there was no time.
“Huuuuurp. Urgh!”
He heaved violently, then soiled himself, before shivering as cold sweats drenched his skin.
The medical minds of this era probably regarded this as an antipyretic effect—the body cooling down—and prescribed arsenic accordingly. In reality, the body was simply dying. Only people from bygone centuries, fortified like brick walls, could drop into hypothermia and somehow bounce back; frail twenty-first-century moderners would have dropped dead on the spot.
“Fluids! Over here, quick!”
“Wait, it’s still rather warm!”
“All the better! As long as it doesn’t scald him! Scalpel!”
“R-right, here!”
Time was running out; acute toxicity was escalating at a terrifying pace. And no wonder. The green dye on those fake leaves... It was dark. Unnaturally, brilliantly vivid. The concentration of arsenic in that dye must have been astronomical. Harboring such grim thoughts, I made a swift incision across the skin of his neck.
I hadn't slit his throat to finish him off. The needles at our disposal were crude. Blindly jabbing one into flesh had a nasty habit of slipping past the vein and puncturing nearby tissue, or tearing the vessel open entirely. A fine hypodermic needle might have been manageable, but delivering a steady volume of saline required a thick bore, which only exacerbated the problem.
Thus, my chosen method was a venous cutdown: cut open the skin, dissect down to expose the vessel directly under my eyes, and insert the cannula. It was a practice almost alien to modern medicine and something I had rarely done in my previous life, but both I and my surgical assistants were remarkably proficient at it. Why? Because we had performed it hundreds of times in Paris!
Back then, victims were dropping by the thousands, supplies were choked off by rumors that entering Paris was a death sentence, and resources were practically nonexistent. Compared to that nightmare, this place was practically paradise. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would ever refer to nineteenth-century London as 'paradise'—yet here we were.
In went the cannula.
“Mmph... uggh!”
“Feels weird, doesn't it? But hold still unless you want to die. If you can't bear it, say the word.”
I glanced over at Alfred. Our senior apprentice, the finest hand at turning gas valves in the entire civilized world, was already fiddling with the apparatus, the stopcocks clicking rhythmically. At the slightest sign of distress, he was primed to crank the valve and knock the patient out cold.
“Colin. I'm cutting into yours next.”
“Understood, sir. But... if you please...”
“What is it?”
“Anesthesia, please. I beg of you.”
“Ah.”
Aha. So our dear patient wasn't thrashing about from muscle spasms... he was thrashing because cutting open a man's neck with a cold blade hurts like hell.
My apologies, friend. Haha. Slipped my mind entirely.