Chapter 41: A Headache…? [2]
Chapter 41: A Headache…? [2]
I did not have no idea what had happened.
No matter what, I was still a doctor.
As blood rushed downward… he must have suffered a hypoperfusion-induced loss of consciousness.
In cases like that, people could lose their memory as well.
In other words, they might not even remember that they had fainted in the first place.
In fact, when fighter pilots underwent G-force training, was it not common for those who had already failed to start doing Valsalva breathing the moment they came to?
No, there was no need to go that far. I had served as an Air Force medical officer and had been assigned to an air wing, so I had gone through that kind of training myself.
There’s no way that can be good for your health…
Could that possibly be good for you?
Of course not.
No matter how you looked at it, blood was not reaching the brain.
The duration had been short just now, but even so, it would not have been unreasonable to call it a brief cerebral ischemic event.
Damn it… wouldn’t it be better to use some other treatment instead…?
Wasn’t nineteenth-century medicine really all over the place?
It honestly seemed like there might be treatments better than this.
“Oh. Anyway, my head doesn’t hurt anymore.”
By then, Dr. Robert had pushed himself upright.
Even as he got up, he still looked a little dazed.
It felt as though he had deliberately been given some other massive pain so that he forgot the headache.
“See? I told you it works right away.”
“The fools still drawing blood ought to see this and reflect. Bloodletting can be done this way too, you know.”
Then he burst into hearty laughter together with Dr. Thomas.
They were mocking other doctors as they did so.
I was not sure they were in any position to do that.
“Go tell him. What was it now… Jémel’s the worst one. He’s absolutely obsessed with drawing blood.”
“Should I? Since it came up, I may as well stop by before I leave.”
“Right. Let’s do that.”
Perhaps because Dr. Robert was here, the group did not merely gossip behind people’s backs. They were planning to say it to his face.
That had to be because they were certain the other party could never do them any harm.
Of course, they did not seem especially concerned about the fact that I was tagging along with them.
I was curious anyway.
What sort of treatment did this doctor named Jémel use?
Wasn’t he supposed to be French?
I found myself wondering why he had come all the way from France to England.
From what I had heard, he was supposedly famous as a skilled physician in his own right…
That treatment from before…
That bastard had once bled a patient from the abdomen because the patient said his stomach hurt.
If that was the case, then what would he do for someone with a headache?
It did not seem like it would be any different.
He would probably bleed the head.
“Haa…”
A sigh escaped me before I realized it.
“What’s wrong?”
Dr. Robert looked at me and asked.
He actually sounded concerned.
“Does your head hurt? No need to worry.”
Dr. Thomas spoke up too.
To be honest, it was true that my head hurt.
Wasn’t a headache an extremely common symptom to begin with?
There was probably no one alive who had never had a headache at least once, and in an environment like mine, where stress was bound to pile up, it was even more inevitable.
That doesn’t mean I can go in there.
Because the speed was slow, I was confident I could endure it.
I had been trained for it.
But did that mean I needed to go inside?
There was no reason to.
“N-no. I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Your face looks a little pale.”
“You look like you’re in pain. If you go in there, you’ll feel better right away.”
Barely managing to suppress the urge to tell them to stop spouting nonsense, I shook my head.
“I’m really fine.”
“Well, if you say you’re fine, what can we do?”
“That’s a shame. You’d feel better immediately.”
Fortunately, even in the twenty-first century there was no perfect diagnostic tool specifically for headaches.
Of course, if there was an organic cause, then imaging studies could naturally be done, but otherwise it was rather ambiguous.
In this era, they truly relied on nothing but the patient’s testimony, so when I brushed it off vaguely, they let it pass.
“Your head hurts?”
“Yes.”
As we approached Jémel’s examination room, I heard that conversation, as though a headache patient had arrived at just that moment.
“Bring it here.”
“W-what is that?”
For some reason, the patient’s voice was trembling thinly.
I wondered why, but the moment I stepped into the room, my question was immediately answered.
What the hell is that?
Jémel was holding some bizarre instrument his assistant had brought over.
It was not even on the level of the long needles commonly used in East Asian medicine.
It was something with a whole cluster of spikes embedded in it, and each one was thicker than those needles.
“Headaches happen because blood rushes to the head.”
“Uh… then this…?”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to stab the head directly. I’ll just pierce the back of the heel.”
“Uh…?”
“Lie down here.”
“W-wait, there’s no anesthesia? I heard they use anesthesia these days.”
“For something this trivial, why would anyone use anesthesia?”
“Ah! Aaaah!”
The assistants, with utterly practiced movements, forced the patient down onto the filthy bed beside them.
It was oddly short, so the patient’s feet stuck out beyond the end of it.
“Uaaagh!”
The assistants pinned the patient down the instant he was laid flat.
It looked exactly like a scene from torture, and at that moment Dr. Thomas cut in.
“Instead of doing pointless things and tormenting the patient, tell him to get into my machine.”
Without realizing it, I nodded.
Until just a moment ago, I had thought of it as a machine that was primitive beyond words, but after seeing this spectacle, it suddenly looked like truly advanced medicine.
But Jémel only wore a surly expression.
“How many patients have died after going in there?”
He countered with death.
Just earlier, they had said one patient had died, but now it was not just one?
Feeling a little betrayed, I turned to look at Dr. Thomas.
Dr. Thomas wore a shameless expression.
“And not just one or two have died because of you either.”
“They were patients who were going to die anyway. Healthy people don’t die just because they lose a little blood.”
“That may be true, but don’t you think the odds go up?”
“I don’t.”
Now that I looked at it, there was more than enough reason for each of them to criticize the other.
Both of them had killed not just one or two people, so of course that was the case.
A doctor has killed countless people…?
What was more, neither of them even got angry at the accusation of killing people.
They just stood there proudly.
Thud.
In the meantime, Jémel stabbed the patient’s heel with that bundle of needles or whatever it was.
“Ghk!”
With a scream, blood began to seep out.
The only fortunate thing was that he did not seem to have hit a blood vessel, since the blood was only oozing rather than spurting.
“So, how’s the headache now?”
“I still… still can’t tell.”
After letting the blood flow, Jémel asked the question.
If the patient had any sense at all, he probably would have claimed he was no longer in pain even if he still was.
But perhaps he was stubborn, because he only said he could not tell.
“Is that so?”
At that, Jémel’s face hardened stubbornly, and he turned his head.
I followed his gaze.
A knife…
Where was he planning to cut with that?
At this point, it was less frightening than absurd.
The patient had come in saying his head hurt, and this man was already thinking of pulling a knife on him.
That lunatic…
“At this rate, wouldn’t it really be better just to use the machine?”
“Dr. Robert… I don’t think you’re in any position to say that.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“N-no, never mind.”
Dr. Robert added his own comment.
Jémel bristled at once, but the moment their eyes met, he lowered his head.
Meanwhile, blood was still trickling down into the bucket on the floor of the examination room.
“Is he lacking blood…?”
Muttering something that made him sound like a vampire, he moved toward the knife.
“Good grief.”
I thought Dr. Robert was about to say that and stop him.
Instead, he said only that much and turned to leave.
“When is he ever going to stop using that barbaric treatment?”
Dr. Thomas did the same.
You’re not stopping him? He’s about to kill someone.
What could I possibly do in a situation like this?
All I could do was come out with them.
“U-uaaah!”
I had no idea what he was cutting, but as we walked down the corridor, a scream rang out behind us.
Seeing the confused look on my face, Dr. Robert spoke.
“Curious?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, are you curious where he’ll let blood from next?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Right. In truth, the machine alone has difficulty treating intractable headaches. After all, this is only a temporary rush of blood.”
Dr. Thomas looked as though he had something to say at Dr. Robert’s words, but he did not dare interrupt.
It gave me the distinct sense of what people meant when they said someone’s lips twitched with unsaid words.
Still, he was in no position to criticize anyone else.
Would you all stop obsessing over blood already…
Of course, if it were a headache caused by high blood pressure, it might have a temporary effect.
And if it were a tension headache, then after making someone faint, maybe it might improve a little.
There seemed to be about an equal chance it would get worse, but this was one of those situations where medical inference was impossible and meaningless, so there was nothing much to say.
But for most headaches… what possible use was there in drawing blood?
“He cuts the arm. There’s a vein behind the artery there, isn’t there?”
“What?”
“He lets out a little blood from there.”
I was glad I had come out.
From that point on, it would have counted as outright killing.
Even so, the ones who survived really did survive.
Of course, the fact that this had become an established treatment in principle meant there were more people who did not die than people who did.
At moments like this, I found myself wishing that when I had lived in the twenty-first century, I had tried even harder to treat my patients.
Wasn’t this proof that human life was astonishingly tenacious?
“And if that still doesn’t work, he cuts here on the forehead.”
“Uh…”
“And if that still doesn’t work—”
There was more?
If that still did not work, did he kill them?
It already felt like he was in the process of doing exactly that.
“He shaves the head and pierces it directly. In the old days, they even burned the scalp, but patients screamed so much that that method fell out of favor.”
“Ah…”
Had that patient committed some truly terrible crime or something?
I could not even begin to imagine what exactly was meant by burning the scalp.
The scene that flashed through my mind was only the one from Game of Thrones where Khal Drogo poured molten gold over a man’s head.
That was nearly instant death, if I remembered right.
“So the machine is the better option.”
Yes, the machine really was better than that.
It meant staking your life on it every single time.
Compared with that… getting into a barrel and spinning around was better…
“Well, of course. It’s quite an advanced treatment. Though there is another treatment being tried these days.”
“What kind of…?”
I really wished he would stop there.
But Dr. Robert looked excited, and Dr. Thomas, swept up by it, looked excited too.
At the mention of a new treatment, it was Dr. Thomas who eagerly opened his mouth and started talking.
“You know the principle by which nerves move, don’t you?”
“Ah, yes.”
Surely he was not asking whether I knew the principle as I understood it.
In other words, he was not asking about the complicated physiological phenomena in which neurotransmitters were secreted according to internal concentrations and so on.
No, they had probably only reached the stage of, electricity passes through and the frog’s leg moves.
Ah, I don’t want to hear this.
It sounded like electricity was coming next…
I was praying it would not be an electric chair, when Dr. Thomas let out a hearty laugh.
“They move by electricity. So there’s research suggesting that if we apply that signal, wouldn’t the headache go away? It started with electric eels… I hear the electricity from South American eels is extremely strong.”
“I-I see.”
Instead of talking about eels and virility, they were talking about electricity.
This definitely was not Korea.
“We used that to pass electricity through… and then we created an artificial chair.”
“What?”
“You sit in that chair, and electricity is sent into the head. There are reports that it improves headaches. Once I get one prepared, come try it sometime.”
“Ah… um.”
It was hell.
To think they had really gone and made an electric chair.