Chapter 49: That’s Not How You Do It… [2]
Chapter 49: That’s Not How You Do It… [2]
“Ah.”
Why was it so serious?
No, why had I even been curious about it?
For a moment, I reproached myself.
“Ugh.”
The coffin the gravedigger showed us was horrifying enough to drag an involuntary groan out of me.
“Urk.”
“Uwaaaagh!”
Even Joseph and Alfred, who had thought they were already used to such sights from the anatomy lab, looked ready to collapse.
“Mm.”
Blundell was grimacing too, but even so, he was rummaging around inside the coffin.
“Do they all end up like this?”
He was even talking while doing it.
The air trapped in there had to smell horrific too…
As I was thinking that, the gravedigger nodded.
I could not tell whether he really had.
He had his back turned.
I was only guessing from the shaking of his shoulders and the situation.
“Yes, yes.”
“Ah… then this means it’s not really of much use…?”
“Yes. Actually… I’m rather sorry to say it, but that’s right.”
Blundell stared into the coffin, his face like a man who had lost his country, looking at the corpse inside, bloated from decomposition.
Inside it was the cord they had put there so the person could shake it if they were alive, and it seemed the body had swelled and ended up shaking it.
I followed Blundell’s shifting gaze and saw the bell at the end of it.
Now that I looked, there were an awful lot of bells hanging everywhere.
Ding-ding!
Right then, another one started ringing.
“Oh, come on.”
The gravedigger shook his head with a look that said he truly could not be bothered.
But his body was already moving.
The odds were low, but there still might be a live person inside, mightn’t there?
Just yesterday, thanks to me, he had seen someone who had almost been buried alive.
So the gravedigger grabbed his shovel and started spitting curses in every direction while he did it.
Thunk! Thunk!
Then he began digging through the dirt.
Only then did Blundell walk over to Colin.
The boy looked like he too had lost his country.
Blundell and Colin both—what a ridiculous pair.
Neither of you has ever actually lost a country, right?
You lot have only ever taken them.
Even now, with all this British Empire nonsense, you’re still plundering other people’s countries in real time, aren’t you?
“My boy, Colin. Are you all right?”
Anyway, Colin truly looked out of his mind.
Which made sense.
For all that he strutted around and acted up, he was still just a kid.
He heard the bell, got excited thinking there was a live person inside, opened it up, and then came face to face with… with a corpse like that.
Anyone’s soul would have fled their body.
He’ll end up with PTSD too.
If someone suffered a wound like that at such a young age, could he even keep being a doctor?
There was no way to know.
And I could not fix it either.
I had taken a knife to the human body countless times, but I had never once dared think of laying a hand on the human mind.
I had no intention of meddling with it now either.
I had no desire to become a quack.
Especially not in this era.
Everyone was already a quack, and I was supposed to join in too?
That would feel like the hope of the age was setting.
“Are you all right?”
“Huh? Ah… Professor. I…”
“That was a foolish question. Of course you’re not.”
“No…”
“You must have been frightened. My apologies. Hmm… I’m the one who proposed introducing this into London… I never imagined there’d be a problem like this.”
Blundell clicked his tongue.
“Aaaah!”
In the meantime, the gravedigger had cleared away all the dirt and opened another coffin, and now his scream rang out.
It seemed to be another failure.
There was probably a more appropriate word than failure…
But for the moment, my head was not working very well.
That horrifying smell, and those terrifying corpses.
The face looked almost like Acala, the Immovable Wisdom King.
Even with my limited forensic knowledge, I could infer that the decomposition gases had built up and made it look like that, but there were emotions in this world that no amount of knowing the cause could solve.
Primal fear was coming over me too.
Still… of course there would not be anyone in this era who understood what happened to a corpse.
There were probably people who had watched what happened when a body was left alone.
Human history was also the history of war, after all.
But would anyone ever have thought to connect that to medicine?
That kind of attempt was an extremely difficult thing.
A shift in perspective was always like that, wasn’t it?
People said that once you changed the way you thought, anyone could do it, but in reality, most of the time it was still something no one had done.
So that’s what a rust bell was…
I stepped away from the corpse for a moment and headed toward the place where the gravedigger kept watch.
There were countless bells hanging there, each with a cord attached.
Those cords seemed to disappear into graves that looked relatively recent.
If someone really had been buried alive, the device did seem as though it might help quite a bit…
But then again, looking at it another way, would it really?
Needless to say, it would be pitch dark inside a coffin.
If they had to shake it, they would first have to find the cord. Would they even be able to?
The unfortunate victim might have spent their last moments groping through the darkness, only to die in the end, and then once the body bloated after death, it might have shaken the cord afterward.
Why did I think that?
Because there were scratch marks on the inside of the open coffin lid over there.
And the corpse’s fingernails had all come off.
Of course, fingernails could come off in the process of decomposition too… but still.
What’s needed is something far more precise than this.
Isn’t it too much to bury someone first and then tell the buried person to somehow handle the rest on their own?
If anyone had a conscience, shouldn’t they be verifying whether the person was really dead before burying them?
Come to think of it… don’t these people even hold funerals?
The question rose in my mind, then subsided again.
Even around a graveyard where no one would want to live, the homes of the poor were packed in tightly.
Even in the twenty-first century, places overlooking cemeteries were often avoided under the label of bad ancestral fortune, yet here, despite all the superstitions still running rampant—and despite people sometimes having to witness scenes like this near the cemetery—they still lived packed around it.
Their lives were barren even after death.
The concepts of human rights and such had not yet taken root.
They probably don’t have the luxury. Still… the nobility probably do hold funerals. Come to think of it… maybe the whole custom itself arose from fear of premature burial…
Should I call it a previous life?
Anyway, I remembered the funeral held back when I was in South Korea.
It had been a three-day funeral…
Three days ought to have been enough time for a mistaken death pronouncement made under most circumstances to be corrected.
And hearing, the sense that lasted the longest and remained continuously active, would naturally be stimulated throughout those three days.
The chief mourners never just sat quietly, after all.
And in old-style funerals, there was even wailing and lamentation.
Even washing and dressing the body could ultimately be seen as stimulating the sense of touch by handling the corpse. Hmm… in practical terms, that really would be a fairly reliable way to prevent premature burial…
It was easy enough to say, Let’s make sure everyone gets a proper funeral!
But actually carrying that out was an entirely different matter.
London was so full of poor people that it would not be wrong to call it one gigantic slum.
This was the kind of place where pregnant women, upon learning they were pregnant, ended their own lives.
That alone said enough.
In this damned city, the solution I had just thought of was far too idealistic.
Good grief, saying that people should have a funeral when they die was considered a luxury.
And they were not ashamed to call themselves the British Empire?
“You look like you’ve got a lot on your mind.”
Just as I was about to really start cursing England, an Englishman showed up.
Since he was a professor, I instantly put on a smile and answered.
“Yes, I suppose I can’t help it. The rust bell… it really did seem like a good method, and yet… hmm.”
“Yes, I thought so too. It’s not as though things like this had never happened before, but I still thought the benefits outweighed the drawbacks… it doesn’t seem that way now. This method is clearly lacking.”
Blundell looked deeply pained.
As a doctor, he could not help but feel that way.
Good grief, to bury someone alive?
And for that to happen even after a doctor had declared them dead?
He was probably bound to think something like this inside.
Have I perhaps done the same thing myself?
Almost certainly, he had.
Even I had only started thinking about it seriously now…
Pronouncing death… doesn’t seem as easy as I thought.
Especially in a place like London now, where there was no margin to keep bodies lying in state for any length of time, it had to be even harder.
In the end, the process of confirming someone had died was also a medical matter, wasn’t it?
In an era when medicine had not developed sufficiently, even death pronouncements were bound to be clumsy.
“Wouldn’t the best option still be to confirm it before burial?”
“Ah, yes. I think so too. But that’s not easy.”
“Hmm… you mean it’s difficult to confirm the signs of death?”
“Yes! Exactly. Ah, when I bring this up, the professors at our hospital all say I’m talking nonsense.”
“What? If people really are being buried alive… then isn’t this genuinely important?”
“Yes, exactly! But, you see, most of the professors say that even if they wake up, they won’t live long anyway… so it doesn’t really matter.”
“What the…”
The premise that someone who came back after being thought dead would not live long was absurd in itself.
Depending on the illness, that could be true.
But if that were always the case, then why did we fight so desperately doing CPR?
Quite often, if you solved the cause that brought a person to the brink of death, they came back and lived surprisingly well for quite a long time.
And more than anything else, even if that were true, could it really be justified to subject someone to the agony of being buried alive?
“I thought you, at least, would understand me.”
As I stood there with my mouth hanging open because of all those thoughts, Blundell patted me on the shoulder.
This man…
Did he wash his hands after touching the corpse?
I did not think so…
I did not let it show.
Anyway, we were in the middle of an important conversation.
And by my standards, Blundell was now a fairly good doctor.
Didn’t he have a good heart?
That determination to solve the problem somehow.
And even more than that, the willingness to ask for help from someone lower than himself—someone not even from the same country—was extremely rare in this era.
“Ah… what kinds of methods?”
“Well, for one, people tickle the nose with garlic or things like that.”
“Ah… so they try to wake them with the smell?”
Yes, garlic did have a strong smell.
I had not realized it when I lived in Korea, but after coming here, it really did seem quite pungent.
Maybe because it was an unfamiliar smell?
It probably would not be entirely without effect.
The problem was that if the person could wake up from something like that, there was a high chance they would already wake while being moved into the coffin.
“But that still seems lacking. So then… I’ve heard that some people drip urine into the mouth?”
“What? Isn’t that just taking out your anger on them? Unless it’s your mortal enemy…”
“No, no. A rather famous man recommended it.”
“Th-that… really?”
Things had just been feeling a bit warm and admirable, but no…
No, this won’t do.
I don’t think this is Earth.
If there is a god, answer me right now.
This is another world, isn’t it? That’s what this is, right?
Answer me quickly.
There’s no way my ancestors did things like this…