The Duel at Trafalgar Square (Part 4)
Squelch.
As I pulled back on the plunger of the syringe, more dark blood hissed forth in a steady, frothy trickle.
"M-Murderer!"
"It's murder!"
"From his—from his very heart! It's the sorcerer!"
Even watching this unfold, the ignorant mob was throwing a hysterical fit. A few in the crowd had even stooped to pry cobbles from the street. Under ordinary circumstances, they likely would have hurled them straight at my skull. But not today. Why? Because I am Kim Taepyeong—the grand sorcerer from the far-off kingdom of Joseon, whispered to have slaughtered thousands in the streets of Paris. Beside me stood the towering, blood-spattered figure of Robert Liston, and ringing our perimeter were our friendly neighborhood gang members, cudgels resting casually against their shoulders.
I really don't understand these bastards.
Still, the mere sight of them lifting stones filled me with indignant fury. This was literally bad blood! These hypocrites spent all day screaming about evil humors whenever some quack drained a pint of perfectly healthy blood from a vein, yet here I was, extracting genuine, life-threatening "bad blood," and they were losing their minds.
"Say, Pyoung. What in God's name are you actually doing? Out of nowhere..." Liston asked.
Naturally, Liston made no move to stop me. He had witnessed far too many miracles at my hands to doubt me now. When it came to medicine, listening to me had never once steered anyone wrong. And how could it? I possessed knowledge from nearly two centuries in the future.
Granted, if someone were to ask just how much nineteenth-century medicine had actually advanced compared to the seventeenth century, I would be hard-pressed to defend it. The overwhelming majority of medical progress in human history occurred in the twentieth century. And the twenty-first? Absolute madness. Every single year brought another paradigm shift.
"I'm drawing out the bad blood," I replied.
"Did you not preach until your throat was raw that there is no such thing as bad blood?"
"Upon further reflection, it turns out there is. Look at the color."
"Well... the blood Semmel drains usually looks far worse than that."
"Heh-heh. This is somewhat different. In Joseon, where I hail from..."
"Save the lecture for later," Liston cut in. "The point is, you didn't plunge a needle into his breast with murder in your heart, did you?"
"Of course not."
"Then I shall take your word for it."
At any rate, Liston was convinced. And not just him—the rest of the onlookers were pacified as well. Hearing the words "bad blood," Blundell and Alfred even broke into knowing smirks.
"I knew it," one muttered to himself. "Bloodletting isn't a bad treatment after all."
"So it's beneficial when drawn with a syringe," another chimed in.
They had completely, disastrously misunderstood the entire concept.
I can correct them later.
It pained my modern medical sensibilities, but what choice did I have? For now, saving the dying man in front of me took precedence.
Blood was still sputtering out in sluggish, frothy bubbles. To be fair, the pericardial sac couldn't hold an enormous volume of blood anyway, but because my crude glass syringe was such utter garbage, the operation produced far more noise and spectacle than actual yield.
Is the suction failing because there's no rubber stopper on the plunger...?
Fashioned entirely from bare glass, no matter how hard I pulled, the negative pressure barely held. The sole consolation was a stroke of sheer dumb luck: the blood already drawn inside had begun to clot around the rim, inadvertently forming a seal that acted like a rubber gasket.
The flow was improving!
Slurp!
The wheezing sound of escaping air ceased, and dark, venous blood surged smoothly into the barrel.
The process took longer than it would have in a modern emergency room, but given how rapidly he had been pulled from the rubble and treated, his prognosis wasn't terrible. In fact, I kept checking his femoral artery every few moments. The pulse hadn't vanished. It was weak, but it thrummed steadily against my fingertips.
"L-Look at him... where is he touching now..."
"A wicked fiend, through and through... molesting a corpse..."
Watching me check his groin, our dear London citizens demonstrated remarkable creativity in their curses. Then again, the vast majority of these people didn't even know a femoral artery existed. Even in the twenty-first century, a layman might misunderstand, so I couldn't entirely blame them. Besides, I knew the mood would shift drastically in a matter of seconds.
"W-What happened? How is he?" the Member of Parliament stammered as he hurried down from the platform.
Judging by his frantic look, the casualties Dr. Josef had hauled off earlier had already met their end. I didn't even need to ask. It was dead silent over there. Not that anyone bothered draping white sheets over the corpses; in this era, a dead body wasn't rare enough to warrant such dignified ceremony.
"Watch and see," I said coolly.
"Watch and see...?"
"If you are anxious, offer a prayer."
"A prayer...?"
I had drained as much blood as I could. All that remained was to wait.
If his vitals don't improve after this, it means active hemorrhage is continuing into the pericardial sac...
In that case, there would be nothing more I could do. Prayer would truly be the only option. Unless the Almighty lent a hand from above, this man was dead. So I clasped the patient's limp hand and closed my eyes. If there was a God, it had to be the Lord, right? I bowed my head in silent petition.
"Good heavens..."
How must I look to them? I had no idea. Cracking one eye open, I saw the MP staring at me with his jaw hanging slack. He should have been praying along with me, not gawking like a codfish. A man of truly shallow faith.
"Cough... wheeze!"
Right on cue, the patient sputtered back to consciousness.
Phew.
Thank God. It seemed blood had pooled slowly from blunt trauma rather than a massive, unstemmed rupture of a major vessel. What might happen down the line was anyone's guess, but we would cross that bridge when we came to it. In a world devoid of CT scans and bedside ultrasound, a pin-point definitive diagnosis was an impossible luxury.
"Dear Lord..." The MP gasped, eyes widening as the man stirred. Then he bellowed, "What a truly magnificent shibal!"
I made a mental note to sit down with him one day and properly explain the true meaning of the word shibal. If that gentleman ever chanced upon another Korean traveler and blurted out, "Are you a shibal as well?" it would be an absolute disaster. The odds of him ever meeting another person from Joseon were basically zero, of course, but the mere thought left an uneasy itch in the back of my mind.
"Heavens above..."
"I-It really is sorcery!"
"How could a dead man...?"
"Is... is that glass rod a magical wand?"
The ignorant crowd stared at my crude glass syringe as though it were some holy relic imbued with divine grace. In truth, it was just a piece-of-crap syringe, but I wasn't about to disillusion them now.
"You will explain this to me later," Liston said, eyes bright with fascination.
"Of course," I replied.
"First, take a look at this leg."
"Ah, one moment. We need to ensure this patient remains completely still. And... Alfred!"
I stepped back to the patient while summoning my loyal assistant—who, frankly, was entirely useless when it came to surgical maneuvers. Of course, that uselessness was strictly limited to wielding a scalpel. When it came to monitoring this particular case, Alfred was the best man for the job.
"Now, listen carefully," I told the bewildered patient. "Even if you want to move, you must stay dead still. Do you understand? If you thrash about, you will die."
"Y-Yes, yes, yes, sir!"
The moment the word 'die' left my lips, the man nodded with frantic desperation. Whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, tell a patient they will die if they don't comply, and they suddenly turn into obedient angels. Though, considering the terrifying syringe still hovering near his chest, he seemed perhaps a little excessively frightened.
"Alfred."
"Y-Yes, Master?"
"You know how to use this, don't you?" I tapped the stethoscope draped over his shoulder.
"Of course, of course! I studied it diligently."
True to my warning, the patient lay as still as a stone, daring only to breathe. Good. There was nothing better than an obedient patient.
Pointing to the center of the man's chest, I instructed, "Listen to this spot with the stethoscope every three seconds."
"Every th-three seconds?"
"If that's too difficult, just keep the bell pressed there continuously."
"Right, right! But... what exactly am I listening for?"
"If the heartbeat sounds like it's getting fainter or muffled, scream at the top of your lungs."
"Ah... understood! I can certainly do that."
In this era, physicians barely used the stethoscope for anything other than confirming death. Detecting a fading, distant sound was second nature to him by now. In truth, the instrument could easily be used to diagnose pneumonia and pulmonary rales, but...
What good does it do to identify abnormal breath sounds?
Seriously, what was the point? There were no antibiotics. No bronchodilators. Even if you knew the lungs were filling with consolidation, you couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Shaking my head, I turned my attention back to the crushed leg. The MP had already scurried over and was practically providing live commentary.
"Good heavens... look at this..."
His dismay was entirely justified. The leg was a horrific, mangled mess. Liston hadn't been toying with his amputation saw for nothing. Yet such was the terrifying efficacy of Joseph: the wound was scrubbed to a near-spotless sheen.
"Hnnngh..."
In return for that antiseptic perfection, the patient had screamed his lungs raw and now lay whimpering, his voice cracked and hoarse.
Must have hurt like holy hell.
No, it undoubtedly hurt beyond human comprehension. An antiseptic... and not even a refined, modern one, but crude carbolic acid—phenol. While it eliminated bacteria, it also dissolved healthy flesh and burned nerve endings. The sensation was akin to having your living tissue flayed paper-thin.
At least his suffering won't be in vain.
If I turned around after that ordeal and said, "Alas, on second thought, we must amputate," he would probably strike me dead with a curse. If pain was inevitable, it was best to endure one sharp hell and keep the limb. Of course, one could argue that we should have put him under anesthesia before scrubbing the wound. But in a chaotic mass-casualty scene, that was out of the question. You couldn't risk having a patient drift off under ether only to realize, post-disinfection, that he had quietly ceased breathing while everyone was preoccupied.
"We won't need to cut it off," I declared.
"Is that so?" Liston asked, arching a brow.
"Look closely. There is no major bone shattering. In the grand scheme of things, this is merely an extensive, ragged laceration."
"Just what sort of cataclysm would someone have to scrape against to end up with a scratch like that?" Liston retorted dryly.
"Regardless, watch."
Taking up a pair of forceps, I began picking out the pulverized masonry and grit embedded in the torn muscle. Seeing my meticulous debridement, Joseph's eyes took on an unhinged gleam, and he threw himself into the fray to assist. Truly, when it came to the fanatical pursuit of purity and cleanliness, no one on this earth could rival him.
"Aaaargh! Aaaaagh!"
If only I had a local anesthetic like lidocaine, I would have injected it in a heartbeat. But such a luxury did not exist in 1840.
"Bite down," Liston said, ripping a strip of cloth from the man's coat and shoving it between his teeth like a bit.
"Mmph! Mmmph!"
He had to endure it on sheer grit and fury. Better to writhe in agony than rot in an early grave.
"All right. Debridement complete."
After more than twenty painstaking minutes of plucking out every stray pebble and fleck of limestone, I inspected the wound once more. For an injury sustained under a collapsing block of stone, the actual structural devastation wasn't catastrophic. The stone itself had likely been porous and fragile—heavy, but shattering into fragments upon impact rather than crushing the bone to powder. In ordinary hands, unwashed and gangrenous, this would have certainly meant amputation. But with my team here, that grim fate was averted.
"Let's close this section," I said.
"Suture it...?" Joseph frowned. "You intend to leave thread inside the flesh?"
"We have no choice."
"Mmm..."
Joseph groaned at the prospect of leaving what he considered a nest of miasma behind. Yet he did not attempt to stop me. In matters of medicine, obeying my lead had never steered him wrong.
Snip.
I had no intention of doing tight, cosmetic suturing. A loose, interrupted closure was far safer; if signs of deep infection arose later, we could snip the stitches, open the flap, and flush it with carbolic acid. It would hurt like hell, of course. But having the nervous capacity to feel pain was a blessing in this century.
"Hmm."
Hearing an unfamiliar grunt, I turned my head to see Colin's elder brother standing nearby. The naval officer glanced back and forth between the man with the stitched leg and the one with the syringe protruding from his chest before speaking in a low, gravelly voice.
"Over there, they are all dead. But here... though they scream in agony, they are still among the living."
See? I told you it was a blessing.
In this era, there was only one foolproof remedy for pain: dying. And nineteenth-century physicians were, by and large, unparalleled specialists in bringing about that very outcome.
"A stroke of misfortune," Josef muttered dismissively.
Look at that bastard Josef. The lunatic had commandeered two patients, slaughtered them both with his medieval butchery, and now had the gall to blame it on bad luck. What was even more astonishing was that neither the grieving relatives nor the bobbies made any move to arrest him—even though it was plainly obvious he had bled trauma victims to death on the spot.
"You, on the other hand, were exceedingly lucky," Josef sneered, turning his arrogant gaze upon me.
To hear a lecture on luck from a quack who had just executed two men in broad daylight made my blood boil. As my brow furrowed, Liston leaned down and whispered in my ear:
"I could arrange for his luck to turn rather foul, if you wish."
The proposition sounded terribly tempting. Like the sweet whisper of Satan himself.