Chapter 37: I Made the Newspaper [2]
Chapter 37: I Made the Newspaper [2]
Once I sat down, the cadaver came fully into view.
About thirty years old?
Male.
His muscles were fairly developed, probably from hard labor.
At the same time, he had very little Subcutaneous Fat, so to someone like me, well versed in anatomy, it was immediately obvious which muscle was which at a glance.
His belly sticks out quite a bit… hmm… looks like there might be some pathological findings.
If I were a forensic pathologist, I would have kept following that line of thought.
But I was a doctor.
No, strictly speaking, I was not even a doctor yet.
And in front of me was Robert Liston, while around me stood reporters.
Not only that, there were students from our school as well, especially the upperclassmen whose jealousy had shot through the roof after I overtook them.
Let’s not waste attention on useless things.
I put on the gloves first.
At that, a few people in the group of upperclassmen let out mocking laughs.
They were clearly thinking I was a coward or that I was doing something pointless.
Good grief, what a time this was, when touching a corpse with bare hands could be taken as courage.
It was enough to call it a thoroughly barbaric age.
“Hm.”
In any case, after Doctor Robert Liston put on gloves as well, the mockery stopped altogether.
As for the reporters, since this was their first time observing the Anatomy Lab, they were too overwhelmed to react to the gloves.
A few of them were practically looking away already, so that said it all.
Even a twenty-first-century anatomy lab would be horrifying enough to an ordinary person, so this place…
“Knife.”
Anyway, putting myself in an operating-room mood, I held out my hand to Joseph.
He stared at me as if asking what he was supposed to do, then finally handed me the knife.
The blade was large, and he handed it to me edge-first, so I nearly got cut.
And nearly getting cut here was more or less the same as nearly dying, so my first thought was that I needed to gather these idiots later and teach them properly.
“Shall we do the arm?”
Doctor Robert Liston wanted to begin with a proven area.
No, more likely, he wanted me to do only that part.
He had to leave a deep impression on these people.
And in a very positive direction too.
Since I felt the same way, I began with an incision.
Riiip.
Because it was not a very old cadaver, the sensation of making the cut really was not that different from cutting a living person.
“Urp….”
“Hey, hey, bring a bucket.”
“Yes.”
At the same time, one of the reporters began retching.
The floor was dirty enough that vomiting on it would hardly matter, but even so, perhaps they thought that was a bit much, because at Doctor Robert Liston’s words, the students rushed to bring a bucket.
“Bleeegh.”
And so, with that strange background soundtrack playing, I continued the incision.
No, the incision was already done. Next came the dissection.
Tap, tap.
I pushed through the white connective tissue between the Fascia and the Subcutaneous Fat with the knife.
“Uh….”
“How is that… not bleeding?”
“Because he’s dead.”
Watching that, the reporters with somewhat stronger stomachs began muttering among themselves.
Bastards… I could do this on a living person too.
Pushing through connective tissue—in other words, performing dissection—was not all that different whether the body was alive or dead.
Of course, there could be a little minor bleeding, but that was all it would be.
Tap, tap, tap.
Even while thinking that, I continued dissecting with absolute precision.
That gradually revealed the muscle, and this kind of view of human muscle must have been an extremely unfamiliar sight for the reporters.
“Waaah….”
But it was just as unfamiliar to the medical students, so that reaction was only natural.
I deliberately turned my head slightly and saw that even some of those who had mocked me earlier now had their mouths hanging open.
It’s too early to be this surprised.
I was about to show them something more on top of that when Robert Liston suddenly stood up.
Only then did I remember that this was exactly as far as he had observed my dissection before.
“From here on, things may get a bit gruesome.”
Doctor Robert Liston’s huge frame soon blocked both me and the cadaver from view.
With his back to me, he continued speaking to the reporters.
“It would be to your benefit to stop here.”
“More gruesome than this?”
One reporter, who already seemed to think he was in hell, asked that.
“This is nothing. Want to see the abdomen opened? From there on, it really stops being a joke.”
“Ah.”
Robert Liston pointed toward another cadaver somewhere in the lab.
Partly because whoever had opened it clearly had zero understanding of anatomy, but also because decomposition had progressed, the result was a sight that was nearly impossible to look at with open eyes.
It was hard enough from a distance, and they were supposed to go close and report on it?
That was too much.
“Then we’ll be going.”
“Good. I’ll trust you to write a good article. He truly is a promising young fellow. Make sure you write well about me too.”
“Of course. It’s hard to judge skill from this alone, but I understand very well that he’s no ordinary nobody.”
“Yes, yes. I hope you’ll also keep in mind that I know where you live.”
“Uh… yes.”
At some point, Doctor Robert Liston had already taken his gloves back off.
Some fists only looked convincing once they wore gloves, but not this one.
What was more, traces still remained on that fist from when he had beaten up some nameless thug at the tavern he had taken us to.
The reporter did not even dare look properly at the overwhelming size, the fresh wounds, and the older scars layered beneath them.
“Good. We wasted enough time on nonsense.”
Starting with him, the rest of the reporters all left as well.
One of them even carried the bucket out with him, and seeing that, I wondered whether any proper article could really come out of this.
Still, I would have bet money that they would not write anything bad.
How could they, when a man like this had just told them he knew where they lived?
“All right, sit down, everyone. Starting today, for a while, I’ll be pairing up with Doctor Pyeong here. If you want to see a model, come here and watch. Then each of you will dissect your own cadaver. If it seems like it’s not going well, call us. You are not to ruin them.”
“Yes!”
“Yes….”
Doctor Robert Liston patted my shoulder and continued.
The ones who had been standing there with their mouths open until just now all lowered their heads with irritated looks.
No, their mouths looked like they were saying tch, but what came out was, “Yes.”
I supposed that was the kind of seasoned instinct one developed after staying beside Professor Robert for a long time.
“All right, then… continue.”
“Ah, yes.”
I wanted to keep looking at their faces a little longer, but Doctor Robert Liston sat down, so I sat down too.
“Now, cut here.”
“Huh?”
Then the doctor pointed to a rather strange place.
That’s… between the biceps, though?
Was he telling me to split perfectly good muscle in half?
But I could not exactly challenge him, so while I hesitated, not knowing what to do, he continued.
“Cut carefully. There’s a vessel inside here. An artery.”
“Ah, yes.”
He was explaining something I already knew.
If I had done what I truly wanted, I would have cleanly separated out the biceps for him, but if the man right in front of me was telling me to split it in half, I could hardly do something else.
At least, I was not in a position to do that yet.
Once I become a doctor… I can do as I please.
I decided to endure for now and picked up the knife.
Of course, that did not mean I planned to do it carelessly.
It would be much easier to split along the Fascia… but when you think about it, this wasn’t my first time cutting muscle.
Cutting open the abdomen also counted as cutting muscle.
Of course, incisions were usually made vertically in order to avoid cutting across muscle fibers as much as possible, but it was not always possible to do that.
Riiip.
I made the incision with full concentration.
The knife was unnecessarily large, which made it inconvenient, but that did not mean my skill had gone anywhere.
Once you kept cutting, eventually something different would appear, whether from how it looked or how it felt.
Mm. Here it is.
That was how I found the end of the muscle.
Below this.
Below this was now another region.
In that case…
“Forceps.”
“Forceps?”
“Yes. Forceps.”
“Uh… those are only used during surgery.”
I was so focused that I ended up asking Joseph for something rather excessive.
Joseph looked at me as if I were absurd.
In truth, Doctor Robert Liston looked much the same.
Though his expression was less disbelief and more confusion.
“What for?”
“I’m going to hold this and cut. Then the structures underneath won’t be damaged.”
Honestly, I was the one who found this absurd.
What I was saying now was not even particularly medical, was it?
It was just common sense.
“Ah…!”
But to them, it seemed it was not common sense at all, but a new discovery.
Then again, that was not so surprising.
There was only one moment when these people ever used forceps.
When they cut off a leg or an arm, and had to grab and pull out a blood vessel that had slipped inward so they could tie it off.
In other words, they had never used forceps in order not to damage something, or to damage it less.
“You really are a genius. Your whole approach is different!”
Professor Robert burst into hearty laughter and stood up.
“We should have shown this to those reporter bastards! You always exceed my expectations! Hahahaha!”
Then he rushed off somewhere.
Whether it was to help me or for something else, I did not know, but he still had the dissection knife in his hand.
Is he going to drag them back?
No matter how I looked at it, he seemed likely to haul the reporters back so he could show them this too.
But a little later, when Professor Robert reappeared, he was carrying a bag containing his surgical instruments.
Ah, right. This man isn’t a Viking.
Right. He was a doctor after all.
As I thought that, he pulled out a pair of forceps and handed them to me.
“Take these. I can have another made.”
Oh, it was a gift.
“Th-thank you.”
“No need. This idea is the best gift. Yes, protecting what’s underneath… good, good. Very good.”
When I thanked him, he nodded with a curious look in his eyes.
He kept saying how good it was, which only made me tense.
Whenever someone of this sort said something was good, it very often ended badly for everyone except the person saying it.
Now that anesthesia exists, he’s not planning to start opening abdomens right away next time, is he?
That would be a real disaster.
Operating with gloves this thick would be impossible.
That meant it would have to be done barehanded, and no matter what one said about Chloride of Lime and disinfecting, there was no way hands could be made completely clean.
In the first place, it was doubtful whether he would disinfect both the instruments and the hands every time.
I was not with this man twenty-four hours a day, after all.
“Go on.”
“Ah, yes.”
Of course, worries like that were far above my station right now.
So I simply decided to do what I had been told.
And do it very well.
In other words, I lifted the muscle with the forceps and made the incision.
With a soft snip, the biceps split open, and beneath it, the blood vessel came into view.
It was not red, the way ordinary people might expect a blood vessel to be.
It was pale.
It seemed they had done a decent job of draining the blood after all.
“Ha… if you do it this way, it really is easy to cut. All this time I’d been relying on luck….”
While I was left with nothing more than a flat impression, Robert Liston and the medical students around us were lost in amazement.
It was no accident that some of them began looking at me with admiration.