The Elder Brother's Operation (1)
I genuinely contemplated arranging a bit of bad luck for Josef starting today.
Honestly, I wouldn't even need to bother Liston. One word from me, and the man would be pig feed—
No, no. Pull it together!
Sigh. What was happening to me? I wasn't just adapting to the nineteenth century; I was rapidly turning into a nineteenth-century mob boss.
"Mister Josef."
"That is Doctor Josef to you."
"Mister Josef."
I might have reflected on my burgeoning criminal tendencies, but I still had zero desire to grant this man the title of doctor. So I stubbornly pressed on with 'Mister,' until Josef apparently gave up and gave his head an exasperated shake.
"I saved two, and you killed two, didn't you?"
"It was merely rotten luck! Reconstructing a nose is... an entirely different affair altogether!"
Technically, he wasn't wrong. If you divorced the statement from all context, that is.
Unfortunately for him, the gallery had other thoughts.
"Boooooo!"
"Doctor Pyeong saves men with sacred sorcery!"
"String up that German bastard!"
"Pyeong! Stab that Kraut through the heart as well!"
Whether by sorcery or surgery, the undeniable fact remained: I saved people. And what about that fellow over there? God only knew what butchery he had enacted, but the bottom line was that his patients were dead. His men had scurried them away so quickly that nobody could even tell what had gone wrong.
Emboldened by the roar of the surrounding mob, I puffed out my chest and put on an even more self-assured face. "Wouldn't one suppose you'll be needing that very same luck when you carve into a nose, Mister Josef?"
I intentionally refrained from battering him with medical facts. It wasn't out of sportsmanship; I simply doubted anyone here would follow the explanation. If I started droning on about free tissue transfers and pedicled local flaps, would that prick even understand a syllable? To say nothing of the rabble watching us.
"Guh..." Josef choked on his tongue.
Most importantly, the person whose opinion actually mattered right now was Colin's brother. Well, technically speaking, the Member of Parliament was the most important figure on the dais, but... he was currently beaming, flashing me a vigorous thumbs-up.
Even though people had just dropped dead at an event hosted by Parliament itself.
Imagine this happening in the twenty-first century. It would be utterly unthinkable. Even if you weren't the direct host, the moment a corpse hit the floor, lawyers and officials would be clawing over each other to determine liability. Yet the MP and the rest of the parliamentary delegation were all grinning ear to ear.
"Hooray!"
"Pyeong!"
"Doctor Pyeong!"
"Did you see that? The instant he drove that blade into the heart, the wicked humors came gushing out—"
"Was it bloodletting? Or ancient shamanism?"
"What does it matter?! He brought a dead man back to life!"
The surrounding crowd was equally ecstatic.
"Best damn show I've seen all year!"
"To be frank... I was getting rather bored lately. Call that modern rot surgery? The old days were proper entertainment! Blood spraying, knives flashing to the tune of agonizing shrieks! But today? Today satisfied the itch completely!"
"Hear, hear! It's been ages since I felt so thoroughly invigorated!"
"Ahahaha!"
It went beyond mere approval; the square was drowning in unadulterated praise. In other words, civic satisfaction had skyrocketed. To modern sensibilities, celebrating while corpses grew cold might seem downright psychopathic, but in nineteenth-century London, death was an everyday chore. To exaggerate only slightly, when someone kicked the bucket, hardly anyone wept except the deceased's immediate kin. And even the family bounced back before long. When death lurked in every gutter and water pump, you simply didn't have the luxury of wallowing in grief.
At any rate, I shot the MP an answering thumbs-up before turning my steps toward Colin's brother.
"Well, Commander."
"Ah... yes."
"What is your decision? Will you place yourself in Mister Josef's hands? Or will you trust my team?"
"Hrmmm..."
The man was hesitating. What a relentless, thoroughbred racist.
It might sound strange, but in this era, Englishmen who served overseas were often vastly more xenophobic than those who stayed at home. The folks in the home country knew next to nothing about the wider world, so their prejudice was just idle gossip. But the men who actually sailed out to the colonies? They compared the squalor of foreign ports against the glittering, imperial avenues of London and convinced themselves that everyone else was an inferior breed.
Well, considering this was the precise juncture in world history where global hegemony was shifting from East to West after more than a millennium, perhaps his arrogance was understandable. But even granting that, how could he possibly hesitate after witnessing the bloodbath that had just unfolded?
Good grief... the man literally wrapped his patient's head in iron wire.
Josef's trauma cases were already dead and carted off—most likely claimed by a resurrectionist or an anatomist's supplier. A mangled corpse fetched a considerably lower price on the black market, to be sure, but a freshly killed, robust man was still prime dissection material. And since they had died mere minutes ago, any standard hospital that lacked our cozy, police-partnered corpse pipeline would jump at the chance to buy them.
Looking at the poor wretch still strapped to Josef's table, swathed in coils of iron wire like an unexploded ordnance, I felt a shudder of genuine disgust. By contrast, my rhinoplasty patient had already shaken off the ether and was sitting upright, blinking placidly at the world. Thanks to Joseph's obsessive scrubbing and carbolic-soaked bandages, the man looked cleaner than anyone else standing in Trafalgar Square.
"My apologies."
I wasn't the only one making comparisons. Colin's brother had been darting glances back and forth between the wire-trussed victim and my sitting patient. He was also weighing the lingering puddles of blood left behind by Josef's two dead men against my two living ones, who, despite groaning in post-operative discomfort, were indisputably drawing breath.
Choosing Josef at this point wasn't a matter of prejudice; it was a matter of basic intelligence. Colin's brother, clearly not wanting to die on a table, promptly delivered a polite rejection to the German.
"What is the meaning of this?!" Josef sputtered. "Do you not know who I am?!"
"I know full well, Doctor. However..."
"Today was an anomaly! Pure misfortune! Furthermore, rhinoplasty must be judged by its ultimate result! A... a barbaric, heathen contrivance like that has glaring limitations! Just you watch! The flesh he twisted down from the forehead will turn black and rot away within days!"
"That remains to be seen, but as for today..."
"I told you, it was bad luck!"
"Be that as it may, I require time to consider."
"How could you do this to me?!"
"It is my face on the line, Doctor. Disfigured as I am, what purpose do I have in this world other than dying in uniform?"
Colin's brother offered Josef a stiff, dismissive pat on the shoulder before turning around to face me. His tone had noticeably softened since our first encounter.
"I must apologize for my previous incivility."
"'Must apologize'?" Liston's booming voice cut through the air before I could speak. "Who precisely do you think stands before you, boy? Tidying up a petty aristocrat is child's play to me."
Naturally, by Robert Liston's ferocious standards, the naval officer's manner was nowhere near deferential enough. The man was terrifyingly strict about such things. In Liston's presence, even the most arrogant dandy found his insolence instantly cured; dukes spoke to him with cautious respect, while ordinary folk practically bowed to the cobblestones.
"Ah... the Sword Saint... I understand. Forgive me. Doctor Pyeong, I was exceedingly rude before."
"There, that's better," Liston grunted. "Now you sound like a man ready for a proper consultation."
Though he didn't quite drop to his knees, Colin's brother hastily adjusted both his posture and his diction. As for me, I couldn't have cared less about aristocratic etiquette. It wasn't that I was some saintly pushover; it was simply that my thoughts had drifted elsewhere.
Our poor Colin...
Admittedly, when he first showed up, he had been a royal pain in the neck. But that was just the typical snobbery of a spoiled rich boy, hardly an offense worthy of execution. And look at the staggering devotion the lad had demonstrated since! Never mind volunteering to have his healthy teeth yanked out for demonstrations; he had literally choked down sewer water and urine to prove his loyalty. Granted, Alfred and Joseph had endured similar trials, but still...
Consider this an operation of atonement, Colin.
I felt genuinely sorry for the kid. Besides, the boys had good bones. The thought of recruiting a fresh batch of students and trying to hammer modern concepts into their thick skulls all over again made me want to jump into the Thames. I'd rather die and reincarnate a third time.
"No need to apologize, Commander. It is quite all right. Colin is a remarkably fine student."
"Is... is that so?"
Glancing over my shoulder, I caught sight of Colin looking at me with eyes brimming with tearful devotion. His brother, on the other hand... though a cloth mask obscured the ruined center of his face, the tightening of his brow made his disdain plain as day.
Ah. So that's why the boy was so twisted to begin with.
It made sense. Look at the absurd lengths Colin had gone to just to carve his name into medical history. It all stemmed from a desperate craving for the validation he never received at home.
"Indeed. Colin possesses exceptional surgical hands. I intend to promote him to chief assistant before long. At any rate, regarding your surgery... we shall make the final decision after observing the healing process of today's nose flap. I need to examine the margins of your wound closely to devise an appropriate operative strategy."
"Ah, I see. I assumed all nasal reconstructions were identical..."
"Far from it. The human body is not a machine turned out by a factory, after all."
"That is... hrm, quite true. Very well. I shall take my leave now. Lingering before the public in this condition is rather uncomfortable."
"Understood. May we contact you at your residence?"
"Yes, send word through my fool of a brother."
"We shall do so."
Having resolved to treat this as an operation of penance for Colin—and possessing the bedside manners of a civilized twenty-first-century physician—I managed to conclude the exchange with remarkable grace.
Once the naval officer had departed, however, I turned around to find Blundell and Liston staring at me as though I had sprouted a second head.
"What... is something the matter?"
"No, it's just... I had no idea you were capable of holding a normal conversation," Liston remarked bluntly.
Liston! Coming from him, of all people! Was he out of his mind? I had always been—
"'There are blood types that match!' That's all you ever do—bellow like a lunatic," Blundell chimed in, shaking his head in wonder. "Good heavens, they truly aren't lying when they say you must observe a man for a long time to know his true character."
Hearing that from Blundell brought me up short.
Granted, I had been somewhat overbearing recently. But I felt no remorse. How could I sit back politely when people were actively committing medical malpractice and killing their patients? And breaking down advanced twentieth-century physiology into baby talk for these nineteenth-century butchers every single day was an exercise in pure futility.
Besides, it's so much more convenient this way...
I had no intention of changing my behavior. Once you taste the freedom of being an unhinged tyrant, there is no going back. During my surgical fellowship, I used to wonder why on earth the attending professors acted like such unmitigated maniacs. Now that I was running the show, the truth was glaringly obvious. When you play the lunatic, everyone else is walking on eggshells, which leaves you completely comfortable. And as long as my work gets done, isn't my comfort what matters most? There was still an ocean of medical barbarism waiting to be overhauled.
Right. I'll just be wildly erratic.
Gentle and sweet one moment, a raving madman the next!
"Phew. Well, the patients are settled into the ward."
Lost in thought, I hadn't realized we were already back at the hospital. Not that the festivities in the square had wrapped up. Far from it—the place was in the grip of a full-blown riot of drunken jubilation. The lingering high of the spectacle had gripped the mob so tightly that nobody wanted to go home. Our local gang was reportedly having a field day, hawking cheap refreshments, picking pockets, and thoroughly mugging anyone who looked wealthy enough.
Just then, the Hospital Director—having caught wind of the spectacle—strode up, clapped a heavy hand onto Blundell's shoulder, and beamed broadly at me.
"In any case, my boy, your fame is spreading like wildfire thanks to this."
"That ought to be a good thing, right?"
"Splendid, absolutely splendid!"
Well... it was undeniably good for business. It sat poorly with my modern ethics that surgery was treated as bloody public entertainment, but we had too much ground to cover to be picky about publicity.
"Which is why I took the liberty of lending a helping hand," the Director added, his eyes twinkling with avarice.
"Pardon?"
I was genuinely grateful to have a partner like him. He was only this supportive because my exploits lined his pockets with mountains of gold, but still—if he had been a raging xenophobe, he wouldn't have backed me so wholeheartedly.
"I was told that in the Joseon tongue, the word Shin means 'God.' Is that correct?"
"Ah... yes, that's right."
"So I used that knowledge to coin a new moniker and have been having the criers spread it through the streets!"
"What sort of moniker?"
"I simply attached Shin directly to your name!"
Attaching Shin to my name?
Why did a cold dread suddenly seize my spine?
"Pyeong-shin!"
Holy fucking hell...