Chapter 38: I Made the Newspaper [3]
Chapter 38: I Made the Newspaper [3]
“That bastard….”
“Look at him, holding his head up like he’s so great….”
If someone had started looking at me with admiration, that was little different from saying that someone else had started looking at me with jealousy.
If you could be admired and still suppress jealousy, wouldn’t that already make you a god?
But I was not a god at all. I was just a foreigner with a yellow face and black hair.
Was that going to happen?
I had been thinking that way for quite a long time already, so I paid no attention to the whispers coming from behind me.
“Good. Follow it down like this.”
“Yes.”
Besides, I had the utterly dependable Robert Liston right in front of me.
No matter how much those sorts of people stirred things up, he was the kind of man who could send them flying with a single glare.
“Oh… so the Artery runs straight along like this.”
“This is the first time I’ve seen one this intact.”
And both Joseph and Alfred were staying right by my side.
Was this what it meant to be blessed with good people?
Was I reaping the virtue I had accumulated in my past life?
I did not know about that, but in any case, I was lucky. That was all.
“Under this. This would be the Vein, right?”
Of course, my skill was ridiculously good.
It was almost a pity that these were the only people I had to show off in front of.
Honestly, at this level, I would have been fine even in the twenty-first century.
“That’s right. Can you see it? The thicker one?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what puzzles me. How can the Artery be thinner, when it’s the vessel where blood bursts out from the heart?”
“Ah.”
As I was briefly reminiscing about the glorious life I had once lived, Robert Liston instantly dragged me back to reality.
So he doesn’t know this either.
Arteries were relatively much thicker.
“It’s thicker, yes… but shouldn’t it also expand because of the pressure?”
Ah, so he did know that.
Then it made sense.
Anatomy in this era… yes, if I had to define it, perhaps I should call it Gross Anatomy?
No one knew anything about structures that could only be understood with the aid of a microscope.
Truly no one.
Frankly speaking, Robert Liston’s standing was nothing compared to mine in the twenty-first century, and yet even he was like this.
“Yes, perhaps… there’s some difference in the vessel wall?”
“Mm, that must be it. You really are clever.”
The professor admired my answer for a moment, then turned to the others.
Once the discussion was done, it was time to teach.
“In any case, there must be a difference, but we still don’t know what sort of difference it is. Still, even if you didn’t know until now, that would have been fine. Without anesthesia, would surgery that took the vessels this much into account even have been possible? But now it is. So keep it in mind. I knew the structure even when there was no Anesthetic.”
As I listened, a new kind of respect began to rise in me.
It could not be helped.
He did study it, even while thinking it might never matter.
This was a lacking era in many ways.
No, even lacking was too mild a word. It was barbaric to a degree that almost went beyond saying.
So much so that it made the saying it is darkest before dawn feel vividly real.
And yet Professor Robert had been making the effort.
From now on, I’ll make sure it becomes deeply rewarding for you.
I barely restrained the impulse to pat him on the shoulder.
He had told me to call him Hyung, and he truly was treating me like a younger brother, but….
This man looked terrifying even when he smiled.
And now he looked even scarier because he had blocked his nose with cotton to keep out the smell.
It was not that the cotton itself looked frightening.
If anything, it looked ridiculous.
He had stuffed cotton in both nostrils. If that looked scary, could he even be called human?
He isn’t human, so….
So I endured and kept enduring.
“All right. Then shall we go deeper?”
As I kept holding it in like that, he told me to go deeper.
That was despite the fact that there was still more to find besides the Vein.
*Are we not looking for the Nerve…. *
I did not say it.
Until now, it had not been clinically important.
No matter how much he had prepared for what might one day happen, responding to something that had already happened and responding only in imagination were entirely different things.
Still, they did know nerves existed. And what they looked like.
Surprisingly, descriptions of the brain and spinal cord had existed for quite some time.
As for where the nerves extending from the spinal cord went, how they were distributed, and what they controlled, that still remained unknown territory, but the general appearance was known.
When I thought about how anatomy had progressed as a field where people explored what the human body looked like even without fully knowing what they were looking at, it was fair to say that human beings were more remarkable than we imagined.
But anatomy still remained only in the realm of inquiry, and its connection to clinical medicine was almost laughably thin.
How long would it take before the two fully joined?
Maybe it won’t take that long after all.
Of course, not that long only made sense from the perspective of history.
Once you inserted individual lives into that frame, it became easy enough to guess how many people might have lived if the timeline had moved sooner.
My coming here could not have been pure coincidence, could it?
Perhaps this was not even Earth, but somewhere else entirely. Still, lately I had been thinking that more and more.
So I acted as if I did not really know and spread apart the split biceps and the Brachialis beneath it.
“Here?”
“No, farther below.”
And from that, I learned something else.
These people still had not established anatomical orientation.
Up, down.
Would communication really work with words like that?
To put it bluntly, had they even decided whether up meant toward the ceiling or toward the head?
Come to think of it… if you look around here, the cadavers are all in different positions.
Now that I looked, it really did seem they had simply brought the cadavers in and dissected them however they had been laid down.
That’s why it looked even more horrifying.
They already looked vivid because there was no Formalin treatment, and with all of them lying in different positions, it really did feel like being placed among actual corpses.
There was so much that had not been established that I had no idea where I should even begin fixing it.
That only makes it better for me.
But then again, looking at it another way, didn’t that simply mean there were that many more opportunities for me to stand out?
Maybe I should let the thirsty man dig the well first.
With that thought in mind, I turned back to the professor.
I really wondered how someone could look like that.
It was absurd that a man with cotton stuffed in his nose could still be frightening.
In any case, because of that face, he probably had almost never experienced inconvenience in his life.
When people saw a face like that, consideration simply welled up in them without them even realizing it.
“Below…?”
With a stupid look on my face, I moved the knife toward the deeper side in proper anatomy, in other words beneath the muscle.
At that, Professor Robert—no, Hyung—snorted through his nose.
“No, not that below.”
“Ah. Here?”
He still did not look ready to hit me.
Just a little frustrated, perhaps.
So this time I moved the knife toward the patient’s head.
In proper anatomy, that direction was up.
“No! Below!”
“Uh… here…?”
Next I moved toward my own abdomen.
Strictly speaking, didn’t that also count as down?
Either way, it was not toward the outside, was it?
Of course, I was standing beside the patient’s right arm, and in proper anatomy the direction I had just moved in was called lateral.
Toward the abdomen was medial; the opposite direction was lateral.
“Y-you….”
Originally, I had been planning to move once more in feigned confusion.
But when I heard him let out something that was not even a meaningful word, I realized my life was already hanging by a thread.
So I caught on and moved accordingly.
“Here…?”
“Yes!”
“Ah, but….”
“But what!”
Of course, I already knew exactly how to calm this man’s anger at once.
“What is this?”
With care, I hooked a taut structure running beside the blood vessel with my finger and pulled on it.
It was a Nerve, and they were fairly resilient—not merely to the point of not snapping when the body moved, but to the point of generally maintaining function even under tension and compression.
In other words, pulling on it a little with the hand was not going to tear it.
In fact, even if you tried to cut it cleanly with a knife, it would not cut well unless you had skill.
“Ah… that’s a Nerve.”
“So this is a Nerve. An organ used to move the body, right?”
“That’s right. Though we don’t know by what principle it does so….”
“Then wouldn’t it be a really important structure?”
“Mm.”
“Now that anesthesia is possible, surgery may become something other than amputation… so I was thinking maybe it ought to be preserved….”
As I said this, I watched Robert closely.
It was not that I was reading his mood.
I had already done enough of that.
This man is definitely dreaming of progress in surgery.
This man, who was more than just a master of amputation, practically its king, was already beginning to imagine other kinds of operations.
He probably still had no sense of what methods would actually be needed.
After all, blindly cutting away the diseased area and removing or correcting only what was necessary were obviously very different things.
It would not be easy.
No matter how much of a genius he was, he needed guidance.
“That’s true. Yes, it would. Then Neurology will become quite important clinically now.”
Which meant it had not been very important before.
It could not have been otherwise.
If you cut a blood vessel, blood came out.
And people had known since ancient times that if blood came out, a person could die.
Compared to that, if a Nerve was cut, it was simply… that.
In fact, in amputation, whether or not to tie off nerves was a matter of preference, not medicine.
“You really are meticulous.”
“It’s my first time doing this… so I’m cautious about everything.”
“A virtue of a physician. It will become even more so from now on.”
In any case, I impressed the importance of nerves on Professor Robert and everyone gathered around us, and then continued with the practical work.
Even though the practical session lasted more than three full hours, the area I had worked through remained only around the upper arm.
In truth, compared to Robert and the others, my pace was absurdly slow.
But no one could complain.
“I never realized the nerves were distributed so intricately.”
“Once I deliberately started tracing them, that’s how it looked… some head toward the skin, and others toward the muscle. Could there be a difference between the two?”
“There’s no way to know. Still… He would not have made them that way for no reason.”
Today, they had nearly completed a diagram of the nerves located in the upper arm.
I said nearly because even for me, using a knife I was not fully accustomed to, the distribution of the nerves was too complex to trace in complete detail.
It was fair to say that most of the finer branches had already been cut away.
Even so, from the perspective of the nineteenth century, it was epoch-making.
Robert, devout believer that he was, looked up at the sky.
It was already night, so all I could see was a pitch-black sky veiled in soot.
But he was looking at something beyond it.
“I truly think you may be a gift sent by God. Our skin doesn’t move, so… nerves cannot simply be involved in movement. It was never an organ we understood well to begin with, but it really is an organ of the unknown. And the fact that you thought about that… you’re truly remarkable.”
“No, I… you praise me too highly.”
“Too highly?”
“But… isn’t your house over that way?”
“Ah, I’m going to the reporter’s house.”
“Huh?”
He already looked to be in a good mood, so was he going to beat him up just to feel even better?
That was what I thought, but what came next was unexpected.
“I intend to make him include the part about the nerves as well. You’re not just any doctor. I’ll make sure he emphasizes that you’re a genius.”