Chapter 5: Entering Medical School [1]
Chapter 5: Entering Medical School [1]
Suddenly, rough, burly men grabbed hold of me.
“They’ll have to cut off the leg! Hm? It’s rotten!”
And then Doctor Robert Liston thrust a bloodstained knife right in front of my face without any disinfection or anesthesia.
He had already been far bigger than me to begin with, but today he seemed even larger than usual.
As big as a house, I might say.
“Thirty seconds and it’s over.”
For some reason, when he said it would be over, it sounded like he meant my life would be over.
“Well then. Shall we cut?”
Doctor Robert Liston brought down a knife suited to his enormous frame straight at me.
“S-save me, fuck!”
When I jolted awake screaming, I saw Joseph’s face.
He was looking down at me with utter disdain.
“You really pull every kind of crazy shit.”
Crazy shit?
Did he say crazy shit?
After what I had just gone through in that dream.
Of course, I did not bother saying that out loud.
Even if I did, everyone would obviously think I was strange.
If the great Doctor Robert Liston himself, the finest surgeon of the age, personally said he would cut off your leg, then you should accept being cut with gratitude. How dare you scream?
“It’s because I had a weird dream.”
“You sure you’ll be okay? You’re more soft-hearted than you look.”
Soft-hearted?
You little—
Back when I was in medical school, people said I was a born surgeon.
Not just during Anatomy Lab, but even when I went into the operating room and assisted, I was never nervous. I did everything properly without making a single mistake.
“You seem to have bad dreams a lot ever since that day.”
I had to admit it.
That surgery really had been a shock even for me.
I really do find you fascinating…
No matter how little understanding you had of medicine, was that scene not horrifying on its own?
And yet he could sleep soundly without even needing alcohol afterward.
Honestly…
Maybe you really were born to be a doctor too.
Though I did question whether the doctors of this era were really people who cured illness or saved lives.
Still, he was certainly bold.
“Still, sleep well.”
“Well, it’s good if you’re sleeping well. But if you’re pushing yourself because of me, you don’t have to. It’s not like surgeons even make much money anyway.”
“Ah, hm. That’s what I’ve heard too.”
I had thrown myself into surgery so obsessively it almost felt like I was possessed.
Even in South Korea, surgery was not exactly a specialty with a bright future.
I remembered what the department chief had said: while doctors in other specialties drove Benzes or BMWs, anyone going into surgery had to be prepared to drive a Sonata.
Even so, a surgeon was still a doctor, which meant there was still a minimum standard of living.
But surgeons in this era did not even have that.
In fact, they were about the lowest-paid people in the hospital.
And that was not in comparison to other doctors.
They were simply the lowest-paid in the hospital.
“If you’re thinking about money, you’d be way better off working under my father.”
Joseph was right.
If money was the issue, it would be much better to just go carry wine.
I had spent quite a while worrying over that too.
But should I become a physician instead?
Internal Medicine.
Its reputation was much better.
But when I looked into it, no one even knew who Doctor Fleming was yet—the doctor who discovered Penicillin.
Which meant there were no antibiotics, and without those, I had no idea what diseases they expected to cure.
On top of that, my own knowledge of Internal Medicine was pitifully shallow.
I had forgotten everything I learned as a student while working to become a surgery professor.
A pine caterpillar ought to eat pine needles.
And later, I heard that once you reached someone like Doctor Robert Liston’s level, you could actually earn quite a lot.
Even if the hospital salary was low, apparently there was additional money collected directly from patients.
Surely… I can become the best here.
All I needed was the license.
That was the sort of thing I had been thinking.
“No. I’m going to become a surgeon.”
“Right, thanks. Then let’s do this together.”
“Yeah. Shall we go?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
The man moved quickly. As soon as we got back to Upton, he submitted our applications.
And whether he was in a hurry because he needed sponsorship money or for some other reason, Doctor Robert Liston rushed things along for us, and we were able to enter medical school almost immediately.
As for how we found lodging, we did go look at the dormitory once, but though it was called a dormitory, the inside looked like hell, so we turned right around and left.
Of course, if we had known what London boarding houses were like, we would have just stayed there.
We were in a hell beneath hell.
“Watch out.”
“Yeah. Can you see their faces?”
“No. But what are you going to do when summer comes?”
“I’ll let my future self worry about that when the time comes.”
Thankfully, it was not the slums.
Honestly, since we were still young students with no income, I had thought living in the slums might not be such a bad option.
But the moment I heard that over ninety percent of the cadavers “delivered” to each medical school for anatomy practice came not from hospitals but from the slums, I gently folded up that thought—no, I threw it away entirely.
Splat!
“Ah…”
“You stepped in shit.”
“It’ll come off as you walk.”
“Fuck…”
That said, just because ordinary people lived there did not mean it was pleasant.
Piles of excrement all over the streets were simply part of daily life.
At first, I wondered why people kept shitting right in front of someone else’s house.
Since I was East Asian and Joseph was a Quaker, I even worried we were being targeted.
But it turned out that people simply shit anywhere, and it just happened to land in front of houses too.
That was not comforting at all.
Fucking bastards.
“Don’t make eye contact.”
“Yeah, let’s walk faster.”
Of course, could I actually call them fucking bastards to their faces?
That was an entirely different matter.
It did not matter whether they understood Korean curse words or not.
You could not hold eye contact too long with laborers filled with rage at the world.
Why?
Because you would end up dead.
“Ah… we’re here. Do I really have to feel this anxious every time I go to school…?”
I did not know whether to call it fortunate or not.
Anyway, the school was close.
To think I had to feel relieved every time I saw the gate.
The relief that had briefly come over me soon turned back into despair.
“Ah… here it is.”
Unlike me, Joseph looked cheerful.
His head was clearly full of flowers.
If you thought about it, his situation had actually grown more miserable than mine.
How could he smile in a situation like this?
For one thing, you reek of shit.
You stepped in shit earlier.
And not dog shit, but human shit!
Creeeak—
As we trudged along like that, we soon reached the lecture hall.
When I opened the door, there were quite a few people inside who looked obviously clueless.
Of course, since this was still an era when an admissions system had not yet been properly established, there were some older people too.
One of them looked close to thirty.
Anyway, these were people who had already gotten acquainted through demonstration classes before entering medical school.
“Hello. My name is Joseph Lister. I’m from Upton.”
So we had to introduce ourselves.
If I went first, the reaction was bound to be strange, so Joseph always stepped forward first.
That said, everyone’s gaze was still fixed on me anyway.
After Joseph finished speaking, he even introduced me on his own.
“This friend here is named Taepyeong, but you can just call him Pyeong… His parents were on their way to Macau with Father Aidan Turner, then ended up coming to London instead, and he’s a Joseon man who came to live here. He looks different, but he was born and raised here, so he’s British.”
A bit of background was needed.
If people heard that we had settled here with the help of an Irish Catholic priest, then even if they still found me strange, they would not immediately become hostile.
And since these people were all aspiring doctors, I had thought maybe they would be a little better.
They had come here to save lives, had they not?
“How’s an Oriental bastard supposed to be British? Does that even make sense?”
Ah.
I immediately realized that was not the case.
When I turned my head, I saw some young brat sitting there.
Yes, probably about my age now.
“What’s some monkey-looking—”
Instead of answering, I began scanning him.
His clothes? High-end.
No matter how much the Industrial Revolution had improved the quality of manufactured goods, luxury goods were still irreplaceable.
Especially materials that had to be imported from all over the world through the might of the British Empire.
The hair too…
Little bastard, is he from a rich family?
That would be a problem.
In this era, the wealthy could exercise physical force if they chose.
Back in Upton, Joseph could shield me, but here…
Bang!
While I was wondering what to do, the door flew open as though it might break.
I turned and saw a huge man striding in.
It was Doctor Robert Liston.
“What’s this? I was about to introduce them, and the two of them are already standing here.”
At some point he stepped between the two of us and thumped our shoulders hard with a hand the size of a pot lid.
“This one is Joseph. This one is Pyeong. They’ll be studying alongside all of you, so welcome them.”
Then he gave an order.
Welcome them.
“Yes. Welcome, friends!”
And just like that, applause and cheers broke out.
Amazingly, the one leading it most enthusiastically was the rich brat who had just called me a monkey.
“Good. Keep it that way.”
“Yes, sir!”
His eyes were smiling, but his body was trembling.
Ah… so he’s had a taste of the doctor already.
Then again, if a man who cut people apart right in front of your eyes gave you an order, what kind of person would not be afraid?
He was not a teenager like me, someone who had already lived through more than thirty years in a previous life, so it was only natural.
“Go in.”
“Ah, yes.”
No, even I was scared.
That man…
was terrifying even before he picked up a knife.
The man himself was just fucking terrifying.
“Now then, regular classes begin today. I do not know how many among you will manage to graduate. Study with all your might, and pray hard.”
He seemed to be talking about repeating a year.
If you repeated too many times, you would probably get kicked out too, right?
But it sounds more like he’s saying some of us won’t graduate because we’ll die…
It was not just the way he spoke. The listeners were the same.
There was something solemn and grim about them, as though they were people standing on the brink of battle.
In any case, since this was the first class, I focused.
First, I took out my little slate.
Honestly, I doubted he would teach me anything I did not already know.
But it had been a long time since I was a student, so I thought there might be something I had forgotten.
“The most important thing for a surgeon is anatomy. Of course, it is difficult to take such things into account while operating.”
But the lecture was strange from the very first sentence.
Surgery that does not take anatomy into account…?
Doesn’t that sound strange even to an ordinary person?
Just as I was about to curse him again, a perfectly valid reason followed.
“Because of anesthesia. Whether you make them drink alcohol or strike them on the back of the head, the moment the knife touches them, they wake up.”
Ah.
Right, there was no anesthesia in this era.
In other words, that meant you had to cut into a patient’s flesh raw.
How painful would that be?
It was hard even to imagine.
I had never done such a thing even once.
“If you operate slowly while thinking things through, the patient dies. He absolutely dies. So once a surgeon takes up the knife, he must move as fast as possible. Even so, anatomical considerations still matter. You may not be able to think of every detail, but you must think of it. That is why you must study anatomy even harder. If you want anatomy to come to mind in a split second, then you have to hammer it into your head!”
Doctor Liston stopped speaking and slammed the blackboard with a bang.
A mark appeared where none had been before.
It looked like it would never come off.
Because it had cracked.
I’ll die if I don’t pay attention.
Even if there were nothing new to learn, I realized I absolutely could not fall asleep.