Knock, Knock, Would You Mind Opening the Door? (3)
“Suction…?”
Naturally, none of them had the slightest idea what that meant. In this era, such a contraption as a suction machine simply did not exist. Of course, the physical act of sucking fluid up was familiar enough, but in the context of surgery? There was not a soul in this room who could bridge that conceptual leap. Even so, the faces of Alfred, Joseph, and Colin darkened in unison. They had clearly caught the scent of something ominous brewing in the air.
Fascinating, I thought, watching their grim expressions unfold.
To be entirely fair, I had offered the suggestion only because I couldn’t conceive of any other solution either. If we were dealing with another anatomical territory—say, the nasal cavity or the abdominal space—we could manage as we always did: flush it roughly with boiled water and dab it clean with gauze sponges. Achieving pristine irrigation was out of the question under current conditions, to be sure.
We’ve been cutting corners on nearly everything else, so obsessing over a proper surgical suction out of the blue does feel a bit absurd…
Certain ideals had to be abandoned decisively. If I didn’t learn to let them go, I would be the first one in this operating theater to lose his mind.
“Aye, suction,” Liston said, utterly unbothered. “Literally drawing it out by drawing a vacuum.”
“How, exactly, Professor?”
True to form, Liston pressed forward with an unflinching, deadpan countenance. If you closed your eyes and judged him purely by his cadence, you might have thought he was reciting a gentle bedtime fairy tale to children. He sounded positively kind. Look at his face, however, and every illusion of warmth evaporated on the spot. Even when offering a simple morning greeting, that monstrous mug of his made you suspect he was hatching some foul conspiracy. And in this particular instance, he was indeed plotting something terrible.
“Think on it,” Liston commanded. “If we are to clear away every trace of this coagulated blood without mangling the delicate tissues of the brain… wiping will simply never do.”
“Mmph.”
Hearing that wiping was strictly forbidden, Joseph let out a heavy sigh. Liston ignored the boy entirely and continued his train of thought. Joseph’s eccentricities were hardly news to anyone by now. Back when we were still in Upton, he had been a reasonably balanced fellow, yet somehow he had developed this terrifying, pathological fixation on disinfection.
“What if we suck it out?” Liston asked.
“Well… with all due respect, sir, even with you explaining it, I cannot quite picture the mechanism…”
This time, it was Alfred who piped up. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have been sweating bullets adjusting the anesthesia gas valves, far too occupied to utter a word. But since our current subject on the table was already a cold cadaver, he had plenty of room to interject.
Liston glanced at Alfred, remarking that the boy’s timing was rather fortunate, and began rummaging through the surgical instruments laid across the table. Naturally, nothing suitable turned up. Suction was a concept I had merely turned over in my own mind; I hadn’t drafted any concrete blueprints yet. In this day and age, pure human lung power seemed to be the only viable engine… but how on earth was he planning to harness that?
“Right. Here we are.”
“Eh?”
That involuntary squeak came from me. Caught entirely off guard with no inkling of what he had unearthed, the sound slipped out past my teeth before I could stop it. The boys didn’t make a noise, but the bafflement plastered across their faces rivaled my own. And how could they help it? Without the faintest understanding of what surgical suction entailed, they suddenly found themselves watching Liston hoist a brand-new rubber glove into the air.
Snip.
It was fresh out of the crate. Durable as rubber was, scrubbing it incessantly with carbolic acid and various caustic washes inevitably degraded the material over time. None of us were hurting for coin, so skimping on protective gloves seemed foolish; we all kept several replacement pairs in reserve. Still, shearing through one so haphazardly was rather excessive.
“Wait, why would you—?”
“Professor, that one is mine… ah!” Colin started to protest, but the words died in his throat almost instantly.
Without missing a beat, Liston took the crude straw he had just fashioned from the severed rubber finger, pressed it to his lips, and sucked with tremendous force. The surrounding air rushed inward with such violent negative pressure that a few loose strands of Colin’s hair, dangling nearby, were instantly swallowed into the narrow tube.
“This is precisely what I mean by suction,” Liston declared, turning to me. “What say you, Pyeong?”
“Well… theoretically speaking, that is indeed correct, sir.”
A breathless gasp slipped from my lips. At that rate of intake, who even needed a mechanical pump? Truly… if we could harness Robert Liston’s monstrous lung capacity properly, we might successfully drag several twenty-first-century surgical maneuvers straight into Victorian London.
“Aye, it works. I’ve only inhaled a lock of Colin’s hair for now, but imagine applying this same draw to pooled blood. What happens then?”
“The blood… would be drawn up, sir.”
“Precisely.”
“Oh… allow me to attempt it, Professor!”
Strands of Colin’s hair were still wedged firmly inside Liston’s rubber conduit. Yet whether despite that indignity or because he was genuinely inspired by the demonstration, the boy stepped forward without a shred of hesitation. Even after instilling modern sanitary principles into these lads… I was forcefully reminded that we were still living in the nineteenth century.
Colin promptly clamped his lips around the exact end Liston had just released, then lowered the far tip of the tube directly into the dark, gelatinous clot of blood. Anyone could see what was coming next. He was about to inhale with all his might. Which meant—
“Hmph—!”
Smack!
Foreseeing an unspeakable disaster, I lunged forward and pinched the middle of the rubber tube shut with all my strength.
You utterly mad bastard!
How could anyone dare inhale blood when they had no earthly idea what foul pathogens lurked inside it? This wasn’t even fresh, circulating blood; it was stagnant fluid steeped within a decomposing corpse. The bacteria multiplying in that dark soup had to be legion. If anyone dared wonder whether it might somehow be sterile, I dearly wished I could drag them by the collar into nineteenth-century London and force them to witness how people lived!
The probability of venereal infection alone is easily ninety percent.
Syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and God only knew what else. Back in modern medical school, I had secretly questioned why we spent so much lecture time on these archaic scourges. In the twenty-first century, venereal diseases were relatively uncommon, heavily preventable, and remarkably simple to cure—though even then, there were always stubborn fools who managed to contract them. But those cases were nothing compared to this era.
In the nineteenth century, venereal blight was the undisputed Game of the Year in the realm of infectious disease. It had shadowed humanity across millennia, adapting so exquisitely to the human vessel that the host rarely died swiftly; instead, the rot simply lingered, festering and spreading unchecked from body to body. This cadaver on our table would be no exception. There was simply no way he was clean.
“Why…?” Colin blinked up at me, entirely oblivious to the fact that I had just preserved his life.
Liston promptly brought his heavy palm down across the back of Colin’s skull with a resounding crack.
“Are you entirely devoid of sense, boy? Inhaling raw without knowing what foul corruption festers in there?”
“Agh!”
Even I was taken aback by the reprimand. Wait… hadn’t Liston just demonstrated the technique specifically so someone would do precisely that? The Liston I knew was more than capable of such madness. He was an experimental fanatic through and through. He had dosed subjects with filthy gutter broth, fed them urine… well, to be fair, we had conspired together on the urine business.
Come to think of it, we’re still dosing him with it.
Though nowadays, we actually paid him handsomely for his trouble. The convict we had roped in earlier had even received a special royal pardon. Calling it a pardon was perhaps generous, considering he was now confined to our facility rather than a prison cell, but his living conditions were vastly superior to Newgate.
Even if he still has no idea that the bitter tonic is his own distilled urine.
Heh.
While I indulged in a quiet, sinister smirk, Liston continued his tirade, shooting me a brief look of sheer disgust before turning back to his pupil.
“Do you have any conception… damn it all… of how much foul miasma is trapped within that skull? It is a corpse, boy, a cold corpse! It would be perilous enough on a living man, but on a dead body?”
“Ah… I see, sir. Forgive me, I failed to consider that.”
It was little more than a classic Liston scolding. Frankly, almost everything that came out of the man’s mouth sounded like an abrasive lecture, but seeing as his logic was broadly sound for once, I let the matter rest.
“What we require,” Liston mused, rubbing his chin, “is a mechanism that exerts this exact drawing force without permitting the foul fluids to enter a man’s mouth.”
“Is such a thing… even possible, Professor?”
“How should I know? Where is that fellow?”
“Which fellow?” I asked.
Liston had turned his ferocious glare straight toward me. A younger, greener version of myself would have collapsed in terror under that scowl, but by now I was thoroughly accustomed to it; I could decipher the subtle nuances behind his terrifying features with ease.
“The chemist. The one who established that laboratory out on the city’s fringes.”
“Ah… the Condom King?”
“Aye, that one! Always wailing about wanting to lounge in idle luxury, yet he scampered straight off to set up a research shop the moment he had the coin.”
“He certainly did. But why summon him now?”
Whether inhaling too much nitrous oxide had scrambled the man’s wits or not, he possessed enough wealth to retire into opulent ease for three lifetimes, yet he continued to labor away like a dog. For my part, it was a tremendous stroke of fortune. Regardless of his theoretical depth, having at least one capable chemist who spoke my technical language was an invaluable asset. Besides, personnel management at the research facility was being overseen by Alfred’s father. The hired hands might turn a deaf ear to my suggestions, but Patrick was unmatched when it came to wringing peak productivity out of laborers. I had no idea what dark arts he employed, but he invariably compelled every soul under his roof to give their absolute best.
“Summon him to devise a solution,” Liston ordered. “A method to draw a vacuum while ensuring not a drop reaches the operator’s lips. Have him construct an apparatus if need be.”
“Very well. If we send word, he’ll come. He likely has little else to occupy his hands at the moment anyway.”
“Good. See to it at once.”
Contrary to my blithe prediction, however, the man did not come scurrying over merely because I requested his presence. Yet the moment Liston’s handwritten missive was delivered into his hands, the chemist returned in haste alongside our courier. Upon hearing the full scope of our predicament, he threw his head back and roared with laughter.
“Ha-ha! If that is all you require, the remedy is simple enough!”
“If this is an idle boast, we shall be severely inconvenienced, sir,” I warned mildly. “And if we are inconvenienced, you will find yourself in far greater trouble.”
I pointed a subtle finger toward Liston. The Condom King grasped the implicit threat instantly, his head bobbing in frantic agreement before another nervous chuckle escaped him. Only then did I allow myself to relax. A charlatan who could look upon Robert Liston’s menacing countenance and still laugh merrily was a creature that might theoretically exist in nature, but they were vanishingly rare. In short, our resident rubber magnate was genuinely confident in his craft.
“Look here. Would this not suffice?”
A few moments later, he presented a rough diagram scrawled across a sheet of scrap paper. One rubber hose extended outward toward the surgical field, while its opposing end plunged deep into a sealed glass collection vessel. A second rubber hose pierced the stopper through an adjacent aperture, remaining elevated within the chamber. At the far end of this second conduit, he had sketched a crude drawing of a human profile with its mouth clamped around the nozzle, clearly denoting where the operator was to inhale.
While it lacked the motorized sophistication of the twenty-first-century equipment I remembered, the fundamental architecture was strikingly familiar.
Aha. In essence… it’s the exact same operating principle as modern canister traps.
Come to think of it, even electric suction machines were vulnerable; if fluid bypassed the canister and entered the motor housing, the entire mechanism was ruined. Thus, modern surgical canisters were engineered with fluid traps built on this very logic.
“Will this truly function?” Liston asked, his tone dripping with skepticism.
“It certainly should,” I affirmed, nodding without hesitation.
“How quickly can you fabricate such an apparatus?”
“Provided the funding is adequate… I can assemble it within hours,” the chemist replied smugly. “I have mastered the vulcanization of rubber by now. The sole challenge lies in curing the tubing to sufficient rigidity so that it does not collapse under negative pressure… but I already have suitable samples cured in my workshop.”
“Then construct it immediately,” I said.
“Well, ‘immediately’ was merely a figure of spee—”
“Construct it this instant!” Liston bellowed, his voice rattling the glassware. “We have a patient! An extraordinarily vital patient!”
“Y-Yes, sir! Understood at once!”
Cowed by Liston’s roar, the Condom King bolted out the front doors as though the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels, only to return just as the evening sun dipped below the London skyline. In his arms, he cradled the completed contraption.
We subjected it to an immediate trial. It functioned. The draw was somewhat modest compared to a mechanical engine, but it moved fluid cleanly without a single drop reaching the operator. Satisfied, we dispatched an urgent summons to the Member of Parliament without delay.
“So… you are asserting that there is something foreign lodged inside my skull…?”
For reasons that remained entirely mysterious, the honorable gentleman had arrived flanked by a contingent of metropolitan police officers.