Chapter 40: A Headache…? [1]
Chapter 40: A Headache…? [1]
This lunatic….
I looked at Doctor Robert, who was staring at my arm.
The moment I saw the gleam in his eyes, I could already feel it breaking.
But the arm he was actually targeting was his own.
“It would be better if mine were the one that broke.”
It was a rational thought.
What would breaking my arm accomplish?
As for anesthesia, honestly, wasn’t it just a matter of turning the gas valve?
That was not to belittle anesthesia itself. I meant that my level was still only that much.
In other words, I could be replaced at any time.
If it were surgery, that would be a different story….
These people did not know yet that I was good at surgery, so it made sense that it should be Doctor Robert’s arm rather than mine.
But if this gentleman broke it, would it even heal properly?
Orthopedics.
The people who mostly went into it were usually the strong types, but the important thing was that it was not a field for people who only had strength.
If anything, there were plenty whose grades were much better than mine.
They made good money, after all.
Why did they make good money?
There were lots of patients, yes, but it was also because it was not easy work.
As for me, I honestly was not very confident.
If he ends up retiring for good….
This man might look like a human butcher, but he was a good doctor, was he not?
And on top of that, he was on my side.
I could not lose a person like this.
In other words, I could not let him take that kind of risk.
“W-wait a moment!”
As it happened, Robert Liston was holding a hammer.
What was he planning to do with it?
Smash his own arm with it.
Lunatic….
Not even a loan shark coming to collect someone’s arm would bring a hammer down on it like that.
Even after just seeing the structure of the upper arm, did he really want to cause that kind of injury?
You idiot… if the Humerus breaks the wrong way, it’ll tear the Artery or the Nerve….
If the Artery tore?
Then he died.
If the Nerve tore?
Then he would not be able to operate.
“What is it?”
Robert Liston looked at me as though he truly had no idea what my problem was.
He even looked a little wronged.
His face seemed to say, I’m not hitting you, so why are you panicking like this?
Haah….
These bastards….
I really had no idea where to begin or how to fix this….
Anyway, I decided to use some cunning.
Honestly, faking an illness was not that difficult, was it?
The problem was that this was the nineteenth century, in a world where most symptoms were not even recognized as illnesses.
To begin with, they did not even call age-related symptoms symptoms.
They were treated as natural changes, more or less.
“What if it breaks and doesn’t set properly!”
While scrambling for an excuse in my head, I shouted that first.
At that, Robert Liston unexpectedly looked touched.
“I didn’t know you would worry about me that much.”
“Well….”
Worry.
Yes, looked at one way, it was worry.
My main concern was for myself, but there was still some concern for Robert Liston too.
“Of course! You’re my Hyung, aren’t you!”
Anyway, if he had misunderstood me, then wasn’t it better to reinforce the misunderstanding?
So I brought up the whole Hyung thing.
I deliberately said it in a loud voice.
So all the others could hear it too.
Especially the students.
Weren’t those bastards the enemies closest to me right now?
My big brother Robert is behind me, so what exactly do you think you can do?
It felt a little like the underworld, but it was true, so there was no better way to put it.
“Mm. Then what do we do?”
After being moved by my concern, Robert Liston tilted his head.
At this rate, from tomorrow onward we would be opening a factory for chopping off people’s legs.
The old Robert might have liked that.
But now that he had brought about the great advancement of anesthesia for humanity, he no longer wanted to keep doing that.
As for me?
That went without saying.
“We need to come up with some kind of excuse first….”
“The surest way would be to break an arm… but as you said, that’s a bit dangerous.”
“Exactly. Breaking an arm is a bit much.”
“Then shall we break a leg?”
“No, could you stop jumping straight to breaking things….”
If he meant the femur, then that really could become life-threatening.
If bone density had weakened enough for that to break, it meant aging had progressed very seriously.
It also meant the protective cushioning around it—in other words, the muscles—had weakened too.
“And do you even think it would break…?”
Robert Liston was, of course, a robust man in his thirties, and among his strong points was his lower body.
If he hit that with a hammer, it would bruise, not break.
It would be easier to smash the hammer itself in some feat of strength.
“That would be difficult. I’ve broken plenty of other people’s arms and legs… but my own would be harder after all.”
I felt like I had just heard something terrifying.
For now, I decided to ignore it.
“What if we made it an Internal Medicine issue?”
“Internal Medicine…?”
“Yes, Internal Medicine.”
“Ah, my head does hurt. Yes. Thinking so much has given me a headache.”
Doctor Robert grabbed his head.
That made sense.
He was a brilliant doctor, yes, but the treatment he had practiced until now had been extraordinarily simple, had it not?
If there was a problem with the leg, cut off the leg. If there was a problem with the arm, cut off the arm.
Now that a man like that had started thinking, of course his head hurt.
“Mm… I ought to get treatment for it.”
“Huh?”
“Ah, I do get these severe headaches from time to time. Don’t worry too much.”
“Well….”
What kind of treatment was he talking about?
These bastards were about to use some incredibly novel—no, incredibly dangerous—treatment again, were they not?
“Well, will you come along too? It’ll take some time. We can think of something else on the way.”
“Ah, yes.”
The moment he said it would take some time, I grew even more anxious.
After all, hadn’t I already seen with my own two eyes that the more effort these people put into something, the more dangerous it became?
“Should we induce diarrhea?”
“How?”
“Ah.”
Even on the way there, our conversation did not stop.
It was not easy.
I had not realized that knowing how to induce diarrhea counted as fairly impressive knowledge in this era.
This was an age that knew so little, yet at the same time knew so much in bizarre ways, so it was genuinely difficult.
Clatter.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, it was not long before we met Doctor Thomas, a leading neurologist and physician of Internal Medicine.
A leading authority….
The moment I heard the introduction, my unease grew even worse.
And it was not just because of the words.
The machine sitting in front of me looked suspicious as hell no matter how I looked at it.
A person could lie down inside it, and from the look of it, the whole thing was meant to spin.
“You came because of a headache?”
“That’s right.”
“Well now. That really is a chronic condition with you.”
“But still… one session with this usually makes it better, so isn’t that fortunate?”
“That is true. Haha. And beside you… ah, the famous disciple I’ve heard so much about. Don’t worry, I have very little prejudice against Orientals.”
“Yes, thank you.”
The two chatted back and forth for a bit, then I was introduced as well, and so on.
I heard a few slightly unpleasant things, but none of that was important right now.
Creak.
What mattered was that Robert had just gone and lain down inside that machine.
He was lying with his head toward the center… and no matter how I looked at it, it looked like a torture device.
“This must be your first time seeing it.”
Doctor Thomas must have taken my horror for reverence in the face of modern medicine.
Perhaps that was why he looked incredibly proud as he kept talking without pause.
“What do you think causes headaches?”
“Well….”
In serious cases, it could be a cerebral hemorrhage or a brain tumor.
If not that, there was migraine, cluster headache….
With this gentleman, it feels more like a tension headache….
It seemed like the sort of headache that would get better with any medicine containing acetaminophen—in other words, what we usually called Tylenol.
If not that, then a massage to release the tension in the neck or pressure on the head itself would probably help.
Those were the kinds of things any doctor could think of as naturally as breathing, but instead of opening my mouth, I chose silence.
If any of those were the reason, they would not be bringing out a machine like this.
In other words, no matter what I said, this man would not understand it. And the more plausible I sounded, the more likely I was to be attacked for it.
“Haha! Is it because you want to be a surgeon? You have no interest in headaches at all. But let me tell you, if the head hurts too much, head surgery may be necessary.”
“Ah, yes. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Surgery.
Did he mean surgery for a brain hemorrhage?
No way.
It was bound to be something far worse than that.
“The fortunate thing is that in most cases, internal treatment like this is enough. Now then, why do headaches happen? It’s the same as most illnesses. No need to overthink it!”
Doctor Thomas swung his arms wide like some mad scientist.
In truth, he really was a mad scientist, so I genuinely kept my mouth tightly shut.
If you could not beat a lunatic, the best course was to leave him alone.
If I clumsily provoked him, I might be the one who suffered.
“It’s because blood gathers there, blood! And of course drawing blood directly from the head is painful. So our great scientist Sir Erasmus Darwin discovered a method. Namely… to spin a centrifuge. Then the blood in the head will move down to the feet by centrifugal force.”
“Ah.”
Wow….
He really is a lunatic.
So this thing really works.
Madness really is spinning….
Whiiiiiine.
After saying that, Doctor Thomas switched on the machine.
The thing truly began to spin, making an awful noise.
Inside it, Doctor Robert wore a relaxed expression.
It seemed he had gone through this nonsense several times already.
“The only problem was that at the time, the technology was lacking, so they couldn’t make it run on electricity like this! A person had to turn it by hand, and often the centrifugal force was too weak for the treatment to work! Even now that happens sometimes! But one day, if we can spin this machine even faster, we’ll be able to cure them all!”
Because of the noise, Doctor Thomas had to shout at the top of his lungs.
He spoke this utter madness with astonishing confidence.
If you spin it faster… you idiot… the patient will die….
Just look at him now.
Doctor Robert’s face—what little I could see of it—had gone blank.
Which meant he had blacked out.
Given his height, there was already a lot of blood that could pool in his feet to begin with, so how could he possibly endure something like this?
Of course, if he had deliberately performed a Valsalva Maneuver—in other words, increased intrathoracic pressure so the blood would not drain from his head—then maybe he could have endured this speed.
But he had gone into it completely relaxed from the start, so what chance did he have?
“All right, I’ll stop it. If we spin it too long, the patient dies, you see?”
At the word dies, I turned to look at Doctor Thomas.
A doctor who had killed someone with a centrifuge.
Is this a parallel universe…?
Every time I saw things like this, I could not help thinking that this place might not be Earth at all.
Dududududung.
At that moment, there came a sound like something collapsing, and the machine came to a stop.
I wondered if something had gone wrong, but everyone else seemed calm.
“Get up.”
“Ugh, mm.”
“How is it?”
“Where am I?”
“The treatment room.”
“Ah, that’s right. I had a headache.”
I wanted to run away.