Chapter 36: I Made the Newspaper [1]
Chapter 36: I Made the Newspaper [1]
Ah… I’m going to die….
Robert Liston….
I had thought he was just huge, but the man could really drink too.
I had not known Joseph could as well.
Alfred?
To be honest, I barely remembered the senior at all.
One thing was certain: that bastard Colin had suddenly started bleeding from the spot where his tooth had been pulled while drinking, and the gathering had to be broken up because of it.
Was he my savior?
If not for that bastard, I really might have died.
What the hell was with the way they drank?
They were not Vikings.
No, maybe they were Vikings….
Anyway, if anyone ever tried talking to me about Britain being a nation of gentlemen, I would kill them.
“Urp.”
“Hey, you’re going to die.”
Of course, before that, I was the one really about to die.
Wow….
No, it was morning, and I already wanted to vomit.
“Ugh… water. Give me some water.”
“Wouldn’t Hair of the Dog be better?”
In the middle of all that, our glorious senior was talking about Hair of the Dog.
To be fair, it was not completely without logic.
If you got drunk again, you could forget the headache from the hangover.
Of course, that was also the fastest route to alcohol dependence, and proof of dependence too.
So… it was not really something a doctor should be saying so proudly.
“Should we go back to that tavern from yesterday? I think you need some Hair of the Dog.”
“What… what are you talking about?”
Then the conversation started drifting in a very strange direction.
Why was dog hair suddenly coming up in the middle of talking about alcohol?
From the look on his face, even Joseph had no idea what he meant.
Though he was a Quaker who sold alcohol, in other words a nylon believer, he did not drink heavily enough to become this dead drunk, so he had never experienced a hangover cure himself or seen anyone use one.
“You don’t know what Hair of the Dog is?”
“I know dogs, and I know hair… but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know when a dog bites you and you put some hair from that same dog on the wound to heal it?”
“What kind of crazy….”
“Anyway, they say if you drink at the same tavern where you drank before, the headache gets better. It works for me.”
“Tha… urk.”
Wow.
I learned one thing.
Not from that nonsense about dog hair, but that if someone said something infuriating after you drank too much, your head hurt even more.
“Ah… I can’t go….”
It had already hurt enough that I could barely move, and now it hurt even worse.
So I wanted to give up.
Honestly, what was the point of going when there was nothing to learn there anyway?
That sort of thought was rising in me, but both Joseph and Alfred stared at me in disbelief.
“What are you thinking?”
“Your courage really is impressive.”
These bastards did strange things every other day, so it would have been stranger if they were surprised now, but this kind of reaction was new even for them.
“Why?”
So I asked, and the two looked at each other, then back at me.
Then they nodded as if they understood.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“Right. Otherwise there’s no way you’d say that.”
“Remember… what?”
“You said you’d do dissection with Doctor Robert Liston today. If you skip that… you’re dead.”
“Yeah. You kept calling him Hyung and said you’d definitely see him today. I thought you were really smooth with people, but turns out you were just out of your mind.”
“Ah… I… I made that promise.”
Why had I?
I should have said I needed to rest today.
Ah, my head really hurts today!
And I felt like I was getting dehydrated too!
Clatter.
Of course, wishing that now meant nothing.
I really felt like I was dying, but I could hardly skip it just because I felt that way.
So I got into the carriage.
Anyone who had ever ridden in a vehicle with a bad hangover would know, but this was even worse than that.
“Ah.”
A groan like a scream slipped out.
It really slipped out on its own.
“We’ve arrived. Goodness, Noble Kim. You look half dead… do you really have to go this far just to become a doctor?”
When we arrived, the Coachman looked at my face and patted my shoulder in concern.
I appreciated it, but maybe because it shook my skull, I felt like vomiting.
“Blergh.”
“Ah.”
No, I did vomit.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s fine. It only got on my shoes.”
And when I saw that quite a lot of people before me had already left their own traces on those shoes, I nearly wanted to vomit again.
Anyway, the hygiene standards of this nineteenth century—no, of metropolitan London—remained something I found hard to get used to no matter how much time passed.
“Oh, over there.”
When I fixed my head as still as possible and went inside, Doctor Robert Liston was there.
Unlike usual, he was surrounded by quite a crowd, and no matter how I looked at them, they seemed to be reporters.
Reporters in the nineteenth century?
I had been pretty dumbfounded the first time I saw them too, but London really was fast in some ways.
Literally filthy fast, which was the problem….
“Doctor, did that anesthesia really succeed yesterday?”
“How many times do I have to say it? I told you it succeeded.”
“You mean… you used the Laughing Gas we used at parties?”
“That’s right. Hadn’t you all vaguely known already? Anyone who’s been to a Laughing Gas party has experienced their senses becoming dulled. No one simply thought to use it as an Anesthetic. Ah, right. There he is.”
The doctor spotted me and pointed with his finger.
“Huh?”
“That young man is Doctor Pyeong. He’s the one who came up with the idea. A very promising youth.”
“Oh.”
At that, the reporters came swarming over.
My yellow face already would have seemed unusual enough, and then the doctor had to say something like that, so of course they did.
“How did you come up with such an idea?”
“Where are you from?”
“Are you really a doctor?”
“Are you even British?”
From the standpoint of someone whose head was splitting and who felt half dead, this was not especially welcome.
But as someone who had seen the terror of the media in full force in the twenty-first century, I could not simply ignore their questions.
If they were on my side, it would be huge… but there’s no way that would happen.
Anyone who thought they could manipulate the press usually ended badly.
Journalists were generally contrarians.
Would it be any different now?
Just by looking into their eyes, I could tell these bastards probably were not good people.
Which meant my goal was simply not to make enemies.
That included my big brother—meaning Doctor Robert Liston—as well.
“It’s thanks to Doctor Robert Liston’s guidance. Especially what happened at the party he brought me to—that was decisive.”
“What happened?”
“I inhaled the gas and bumped into something, but it didn’t hurt. It should have hurt… but it didn’t.”
“Oh? So you got the hint from that?”
Colin was not there.
So I completely left out any mention of Colin, despite the fact that he had contributed in his own way.
“I’m from Joseon. It’s a country if you keep going east from here.”
“East? Near India?”
“Ah, no. Farther east than Qing.”
“Ah… so you’re from the Far East.”
“Th… that’s right.”
Far East.
Bastards.
What, were you the center of the world?
I wanted to say that, but I was good at compromise and also rather timid, so I just nodded.
“I’m not a doctor yet, but I’m studying hard under Doctor Robert Liston’s guidance.”
“Ah… is that so?”
“Ah, one moment.”
Just as I kept answering, Robert Liston cut in.
Honestly, I had realized my mistake too.
More than one of them had already started to look like hyenas.
But if they were hyenas, Robert Liston was a lion.
He reached out and gripped the fountain pen of the one who had been the first to say, “Ah, is that so?”
Snap.
It broke.
It really broke like something out of a comic.
“Uh…?”
“My apologies. A mistake.”
There was no way it had been a mistake, but if the lion said it was a mistake, then it was a mistake.
The quicker ones quietly scratched out the lines they had written saying, “He is not a doctor.”
A fountain pen could not have been cheap, and if it broke, they would naturally feel cheated.
Having overwhelmed everyone there in that way, Robert Liston continued.
“He soon will be. He’s fully qualified.”
“But… as far as we know, Taepyeong? This man hasn’t even been here a few months.”
One fellow standing a little farther away asked that.
Robert clenched and unclenched his fist.
As a man of science, he had probably been about to solve the problem with physics.
But the men in front of him were all from the humanities, were they not?
It was better to change his thinking.
There was a reason people said the pen was mightier than the sword.
If these bastards went back and started babbling away, Doctor Robert Liston might be fine, but I could end up hanging in the square.
“Doing something for a long time and doing it well are different matters. Just look at me. Is there any surgeon with experience who is better than I am?”
“Well. That’s… but Doctor, you’re London’s greatest genius, aren’t you? There’s no fair comparison….”
“Pyeong is a man worthy to be compared to me. If you still can’t believe it….”
Whether he had thought the same thing or not, Robert continued calmly.
Of course, his patience did not last very long.
That was probably because he had never really had to hold himself back.
“Go watch over there.”
“Over there…?”
So Robert pointed at the Anatomy Lab.
At a glance, the entrance radiated an aura that would make any ordinary person’s knees give way.
A tightly shut door at the end of a dim corridor.
Cloth masks and scraps of cotton lay beside it.
Spots of blood dripped on the floor.
If it had not been in a medical school, but somewhere else entirely, anyone could have believed it was the entrance to hell or the mouth of some dungeon.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
That said enough, considering that even I, who had gone in and out several times by now, still thought of hell every time I looked at that entrance.
“You want us to go in there?”
“Yes.”
“Wh… what are you going to do?”
“Watch the dissection.”
“Ah.”
The reporters had probably all thought of death.
But despite his overbearing appearance, Robert really was a doctor.
And a very skilled one.
Wasn’t he utterly sincere when it came to saving people?
Looking baffled, he headed for the entrance.
Creak.
Then he opened the door.
“Urp.”
The reporters who had gathered the courage to follow behind him all turned their heads at once.
They had not even fully witnessed the grandeur of the Anatomy Lab yet, but the smell alone was enough to fill them with terror.
By contrast, I was unexpectedly fine.
Is it because my mucous membranes are swollen? Or because I’m still drunk…? I can’t really smell much.
Several possibilities came to mind, but in any case, once I covered it with a wad of cotton, it was bearable.
The only problem was that my hand trembled a little when I lifted it, but even that was fine.
The gloves were so thick that once I put them on, no one would notice whether I was shaking or not.
“Let’s use this one.”
In the meantime, Doctor Robert sat down in front of one of the cadavers.
It was one I had worked on before, and naturally, some time had passed, so decomposition had progressed.
It was unpleasant, but I was in a position where I also needed to make an impression on the reporters, so I sat down as though it were nothing.
“Shall we?”
“Yes. All of you, come over and watch.”
“No, we…”
“There’s no need for us to….”
“Come and watch.”
“Uh… yes.”
“And then write your article. Watch how good he is, then write it. Before you start picking a fight.”