Chapter 26: The God of Dissection [1]
Chapter 26: The God of Dissection [1]
Class ended.
Ah, today had been fucking unrewarding too.
As usual, there was not much worth taking from class.
Since most of what they said was just babble from people who had come in without proper knowledge, listening to it was enough to get in the way instead.
But could I plug my ears?
That would not do.
Make sure you know it. I will test you on it.
Robert Liston.
The huge doctor had said he would even give us tests.
Damn it....
To think I had to memorize this nonsense.
Maybe it was because I knew too well in my head that this was wrong, or maybe my doctor’s instincts were filtering it out on their own, but it was unbearably hard.
“Pyeong. So starting today, you’re going back into dissection?”
It was Alfred who blew away my torment.
Even if he was a lacking senior, he was still kind, was he not?
Holding the gloves we had received from the factory yesterday, he spoke to me.
His face was already turned toward the Anatomy Room.
Anyway, he was diligent.
The stupid but diligent ones are the ones who cause the most accidents....
But this era was full of nothing but people like that, so what could I do.
I would just have to cover the stupid part myself.
Can I do it?
At first, that thought had crossed my mind too.
But the moment I stepped into the Anatomy Room, the doubt vanished and excitement took its place.
To feel excitement while looking at rotting corpses, flies buzzing everywhere, maggots, and the like....
That went beyond strange and almost made me seem perverted....
I guess I really can’t help being a surgeon.
Just thinking about holding a knife again after so long, this really....
Heh heh.
“Uh... a new corpse came in!”
At that moment, Joseph cried out excitedly.
A corpse coming in meant someone had died... and yet for a medical student to be so happy about it felt wrong.
But this was also just how things had to be in this era.
There did not seem to be formalin yet, did there?
Even if there was, it was not something I could use right away.
If I just said they should pour that on... I would be suspected.
That was something to consider later, after I had made a name for myself.
“Well then, here. The handling fee.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you.”
Anyway, the supplier took the money the professor handed over and disappeared.
Maybe it was because I had heard that part of that money went to the donor’s family, or maybe for some other reason, but in any case, it did not make me as uncomfortable as before.
“Three bodies came in.”
Robert Liston nodded, swept his gaze over the room, then found my face and opened his mouth.
“So you’ve finally made up your mind. If you kept skipping, I was going to cut you.”
And then he said something terrifying.
Cut me?
You bastard.
I’m the hope of this era.
If you cut me, you’ll end up killing quite a few people without even knowing it.
“Yes, thank you. Ah, and this... is a gift.”
Of course, with that face right in front of me, there was no way I could casually say any of that.
It was not even something I consciously thought through. My tongue just moved on instinct.
Maybe my university hospital training helped, but anyway, I was flattering him so naturally it was almost frightening.
“What is this?”
“Gloves.”
“Gloves...? Winter is still far off. And this is not the right time for them either.”
Robert Liston was quite the talker.
And yet his body was honest, because he had already taken the gloves into his hands.
Bastard.
“I had them made for you to use during dissection.”
Before I brought them, I had even roughly matched the size by eye.
That was only possible because they could not be made precisely anyway.
It was not as though they had to fit tightly when they were not even for surgery.
“For dissection?”
“Yes. Wouldn’t it feel unpleasant? The thought of miasma getting on your hands... and in a way, it could be dangerous.”
Anyway, my tongue was moving like it had a motor attached to it.
I had not even prepared a script, and yet it all came so smoothly.
I was probably just that desperate.
Anyone standing in front of Robert Liston would have no choice but to be.
“Hm... if that is how you were thinking, then good. But if these get wet, wouldn’t they be a bother to clean?”
“They won’t get wet. They’re waterproof.”
“Oh?”
Fortunately, Robert Liston seemed to like the item quite a bit, tilting his head before immediately putting them on.
Which was only natural.
Was there really anyone who liked touching corpses with bare hands?
Of course not.
“Well then... hm. Let’s divide up like this.”
Robert Liston was the sort of man who believed strongly in saving lives, and just as strongly in returning what he received.
Just as he had treated me well based on the money he had received from the old man, he also gave the gloves their due value.
“The lead will be....”
“I’ll do it.”
There were five of us assigned to the same group.
Me, Joseph, Alfred, Colin, and one of Colin’s nameless lackeys.
Colin was already fiddling with the knife, apparently certain that either he or Alfred would be the one taking the lead.
From his point of view, that was understandable enough.
He had worked hard, after all.
Idiot....
What was the use of working hard in the wrong direction?
“All right then, this time, Pyeong. You do it.”
Anyway, Robert Liston placed the knife in my hand.
Colin looked shocked, but he did not dare voice any objection.
Naturally.
If he did, he might die.
“Thank you, Professor.”
Anyway, I naturally ended up holding the knife.
Then I looked down.
At most, the man looked around thirty?
No, he might even have been younger than that.
Humans in the nineteenth century, with direct sunlight beating down on them and wretched living conditions, aged far faster than people in the twenty-first.
“No... why are you doing this? Senior, doesn’t this bother you at all?”
As I stood there looking down, Colin started complaining.
Robert Liston had stepped away, but he was not actually out of the Anatomy Room, so Colin kept his voice low. Still, it was loud enough for everyone in our group to hear.
And Alfred, whose pride Colin had just prodded, heard every word clearly.
“Mm, not really.”
But the response he got was nothing like what Colin expected.
“What...?”
“You wouldn’t know... but Pyeong is a genius. And a noble from Joseon.”
“No... even so, he’s still a monkey....”
“Watch your mouth. He’s my lifesaver.”
It was not merely indifferent. It was openly hostile.
Colin may have known we moved around together, but to him I was probably nothing more than some monkey from Joseon, so he must have been quite shocked.
Look at that, his hands are shaking.
But what a pity....
The truly hand-shaking part had not even happened yet.
Watch. Behold my power.
Where should I start?
Where should I begin... to shock these bastards?
My original specialty was the abdomen, but....
The abdomen was practically a completely unknown world to these people.
It would not even be an exaggeration to say that all they really knew was that some organs were inside there. They had no idea where the blood vessels went or how the nerves were distributed.
In truth, even saying they knew the organs was generous. If you dug any deeper, they did not know what structures they had, what they did, or what they secreted.
It was that kind of era.
They did not perform abdominal surgery at all.
If they called it surgery when they simply cut without disinfecting anything, then what would happen if they opened the abdomen?
Whew.
The thought alone was horrible enough to make me sigh.
But was I not now someone who had already spent several months in a nineteenth-century medical college?
Unlike before, I no longer suffered by pointlessly unleashing my overly vivid imagination.
“Then... shall we start with the arm? We’ve studied this part the most.”
“Oh, right.”
“No... what do you even know...!”
“Shut up, you. Want to die?”
Anyway, the part they had the most knowledge about in this era was the limbs, the arms and legs.
Though even then....
At most they knew what the bones looked like. Once things went deeper, they had no idea.
Which made sense. Since they did not cut based on knowledge in the first place, and decomposition limited the time they had, there was only so much they could do.
London was at least fortunate enough to have these... suppliers. In other places, I had heard that obtaining a corpse at all was like plucking a star from the sky.
Sliiick.
First, I made an incision.
The exact site was the upper arm.
In medical terms, the region where the humerus lay.
If I plunged too deep, I could damage all the structures inside, so I cut carefully.
“Why are you so slow? You’ve got to do it fast!”
Colin started ranting because my pace frustrated him.
Well, that was understandable.
Dissection in this era could not distinguish layers.
Surgery itself was all about cutting boldly and quickly, so why would they ever think to consider such things?
It has to be different from now on....
As long as anesthesia was impossible, it was true that they could not really consider it in practice.
But just because it could not be done in reality did not mean a doctor did not need to know it.
At the very least, I believed a person should know what exactly they were cutting when they amputated.
“Now then....”
First, I made the incision only through the skin.
Beneath it, reddish muscle could be seen.
Looking at it like this... it really does look like a living person.
In truth, this was the first time even I had dissected a corpse that had died so recently.
It felt completely different from a formalin-preserved body.
More vivid, perhaps.
Sliiick.
At the same time, it allowed for a much more convincing dissection.
I slipped my finger between the skin and the muscle.
That was only possible because I was wearing gloves instead of going barehanded.
Sliiick.
With the sound of something tearing, the skin and the muscle separated.
“Uh...?”
“How... how did that happen?”
In medical terms, I was performing a Finger Dissection.
The dermis, and beneath it the subcutaneous fat and the fascia covering the muscle, were not firmly stuck together, so they could be pushed apart and peeled back even with a finger.
There was almost no bleeding, either.
The capillaries were no longer connected.
Instead, the thicker structures ran separately, and those could all be seen with the naked eye.
Rip-rip-rip.
Anyway, as I pushed steadily along the incision line with my finger, the muscle revealed itself even more starkly.
“Uh... how did you do that?”
This sight was bound to be quite a shock.
How much of a shock?
Colin had already lost his voice, and even the others nearby had come over.
Even Robert Liston had come over.
Ordinarily... I’d have made a Joseon joke here, but....
If I looked too mysterious and then got exposed as a fraud, I felt like I would die.
So I chose my approach.
Starting today, I’m going with the genius angle....
It was not even entirely a lie, was it?
When I was a surgery professor, people called me a genius more than once.
Well, I was probably not the level of genius these people could accept yet.
“There were... three points where the feeling changed while I cut with the knife.”
“Not once, but three times?”
It was all complete nonsense.
To begin with, the gloves were thick, so I could barely feel anything.
I was doing it by sight.
But what did it matter?
Today was the first time anyone besides me had even worn gloves, and including me there were only four people wearing them at all.
“Yes. When it cut this thinly.”
If I had really been a genius, I could have cut only the epidermis, but unfortunately I had to go through the dermis as well.
“And then when it cut a little thicker....”
Next came the subcutaneous fat.
It was probably visibly different even to them.
Subcutaneous fat was a yellow fatty layer.
There was barely any of it, since he was young, male, and this was the arm, but still.
“And then the muscle underneath. But the muscle felt distinctly different, so I stopped there. When I pulled upward, I saw these white strands, so I tried pushing with my finger. And then it became like this....”
“Hah!”
At my shameless performance, Robert Liston’s mouth fell open.
The others?
The others had all gone completely silent.