Chapter 50: That’s Not How You Do It… [3]
Chapter 50: That’s Not How You Do It… [3]
This is another world… a parallel universe…
Keeping my face as normal as possible, I kept repeating that to myself inwardly.
I could not help it.
The more I listened, the more it became clear that dripping urine into someone’s mouth was nothing at all.
These lunatics…
This was real madness…
“But think about it. Urine only serves as a stimulus if the person recognizes it as urine, doesn’t it? If you just pour it into the mouth, it’s no different from warm water.”
“Th-that’s true. But don’t the bereaved families complain?”
“Isn’t it better than premature burial? Think about it. Suppose you buried your father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother alive. How could you bear that guilt?”
“Ah… I see.”
Anyway, these bastards genuinely thought urine was no big deal.
I could hardly believe it, but the more I listened, the more it really seemed like no big deal.
I almost felt like shouting that they should just pour the urine already.
“There was also a doctor who tried touching a sensitive place with a heated poker. I considered trying it myself… but preparing the equipment to heat the poker was not simple.”
“You… you refrained from doing it because of that?”
By now, I had forgotten even the smell drifting from the graveside.
A heated poker?
Wasn’t that the sort of thing people used for torture?
“He said he burned the anus with it, and the person revived.”
“No… does that count as living?”
“He died again. But at least he wasn’t buried alive.”
He even burned the anus?
That lunatic.
Then the poor man probably could not even defecate before he died.
We call that murder, Doctor.
“I… see.”
Was that… better than being buried alive?
Honestly, the two were not even comparable, so I could not get a sense of it.
No, to be honest, I did not even want to get a sense of it.
Damn it.
“But that method was rather… difficult to equip for, and not very pleasant to look at, was it? There were continual protests from the bereaved.”
“Th-that makes sense. Naturally.”
For bereaved families who loved the deceased enough to not even want to imagine the possibility of premature burial, there was no way watching someone’s anus being burned would have looked acceptable.
Lunatics.
How could they do something like that?
You bastards.
Still, I was relieved that he had at least reconsidered.
Part of me even thought, So they do listen when people object.
“That’s why, you see. I thought a great deal about whether I should use this too.”
As I stood there nodding, Blundell suddenly pulled something out.
No matter how I looked at it, it was dangerous.
A needle?
No, that was a knife.
The sort best suited for stabbing someone…
Ah, right.
It also looked like a sharply honed awl.
“This… what in the world…”
My immediate thought was: If I’ve done something wrong, please just say it.
Joseph and Alfred had long since gone completely blank.
That meant if Blundell stabbed me with that awl, they would not even be able to stop him.
The corpse we had seen earlier really had been that horrifying, and the next body the gravedigger had pulled out had been just as horrific.
They were bloated corpses swollen from decomposition—enough said.
“Ah, you stab the heart with this.”
“What?”
For a moment, I wondered if I had blacked out somewhere in the middle of the conversation.
Hadn’t we been talking about confirming whether someone was dead or alive?
So why was stabbing the heart suddenly entering the discussion?
What was this, some Brotherhood ritual?
Blundell, are you Assassin’s Creed?
Now that I looked at it, the way he held the knife really was not ordinary…
“Think about it. If the person were alive, blood would spurt the instant you stabbed.”
“No… but then they’d die immediately.”
“At least they’d avoid being buried alive.”
“No… that’s…”
“It is for that purpose that all these painstaking efforts are made.”
“What?”
This bastard had no intention of saving people in the first place?
Was the reason the gravedigger kept holding that shovel because the moment a supposedly dead body revived, he planned to crack its head and kill it for real?
Terrible thoughts kept circling through my mind.
Fortunately, Blundell went on speaking when he saw the horror on my face.
“Of course, I thought that alone was insufficient. As I said earlier, I didn’t burn the anus with a poker either.”
Normally, if someone could not do something because they lacked the equipment, they did not go around saying they had chosen not to do it, did they?
It really felt as though he was revising his thoughts in real time while looking at my face, but in any case, Blundell abruptly continued the conversation in a tone that sounded like he was criticizing those senseless doctors.
“Here too, I think your point is right. If the only goal is to prevent premature burial, then it is a perfect method. Because it kills them without fail. But that patient from yesterday… he’s still alive, isn’t he?”
“Yes. I think he may well survive.”
There were countless hurdles still to clear, and high ones too—such as infection and whatever underlying illness had caused the headache in the first place—but at any rate, saying he might survive was not a lie.
That seemed to shock him quite deeply.
Which made sense. This was an age that did not even have the term CPR.
Someone who had once been declared dead could live again.
That would have been unimaginable.
Thinking about it that way, the idea of stabbing the heart to make sure someone was truly dead almost became understandable—
No, no. Don’t get contaminated by this. Absolutely not.
But I obviously could not shake my head at this point.
That would have looked like some kind of sign that someone was about to die.
And it felt like he might reverse the change of heart he had only just managed to arrive at.
“To begin with, I worry a great deal about premature burial. It could happen to me as well, couldn’t it? Just imagine it… closing your eyes, opening them again, and finding yourself inside a coffin. With dirt already piled on top.”
“What if you rang that rust bell… would that not work?”
Until just now, that rust bell or whatever it was had seemed completely useless.
But after hearing about anuses and hearts, it now looked like the light and hope of the age.
Of course, the problem still remained.
And it was quite a serious one.
Because this was nineteenth-century London.
“That’s the thing. Sometimes the suppliers… deliver defective goods. Later, when they dig it up, the cord has snapped. Think about it. The buried person has to overcome the weight of the earth and pull the cord… and it’s not as though we can really conduct an experiment.”
“Ah…”
To begin with, expecting craftsmanship here was impossible.
This was, quite literally, the age of money worship.
In an age where money came before all else, if you asked someone to make a bell because a dead person might still be alive, would they make it properly?
Even the lives of living laborers were already horrific enough.
“And then there are defects on top of that… so really, there was no way it could work.”
“I see. Right. Ah.”
“So in the end, a doctor must verify it. We cannot allow this tragedy to continue.”
“Mm…”
The fact that someone like Blundell existed really was fortunate.
Of course, at the root of it all, it still seemed that his main concern was that he himself did not want to be buried alive.
But how often in the world were intention, purpose, and result all equally good?
Whatever it was, if the result was good, that was enough.
Especially in a damned world like this.
“Can you think of a good method?”
“Well… for now… hmm.”
Was there a stethoscope?
There definitely was no electrocardiogram.
I had not even seen anything similar.
And if they had had something like that, would all this nonsense about premature burial even exist?
An electrocardiogram really was an extremely precise device.
Breathing, circulation… really, those are the most important things. But we can’t confirm them properly. Watching over the body with time… that’s impossible for ordinary laborers in London.
Apparently there were cases where they did not even have a grave and simply buried the body in secret.
That was why the gravedigger was stationed here in the first place.
Not just because of the rust bells, but because there were so many people who simply opened someone else’s grave and buried the body there instead.
But a morgue?
That would be difficult.
Even a funeral was already an extravagance beyond reason.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Good. Just don’t devote yourself only to helping Professor Liston. Your genius ideas are too valuable to be confined to one field alone.”
“Th… understood.”
Not to focus on a single field.
Whenever I heard things like that, I truly felt again that this was the nineteenth century.
Not that I had failed to feel it before, but this was about scholarship too.
By the twenty-first century, every field had developed so far that unless you found a tiny niche and focused on it, it was difficult even to become what people called an expert.
The respect people paid to specialists felt even more extreme in the modern era, which was absurd in its own way…
But in this period, science had accumulated so little knowledge that the existence of one genius could have enormous impact.
“Now then… first, let’s take care of Colin and head back. He seems badly shaken.”
“Yes, he’s weak-hearted.”
“Mm. That’s what I mean. We see corpses every day, don’t we?”
“Th… that’s true.”
To be precise, doctors in this era actually saw corpses far more often than necessary.
Still, setting that aside, the fact that he had lost his wits after seeing just one was not a good sign in terms of his qualifications as a doctor.
The gravedigger, at least, was doing his own job just fine, wasn’t he?
“Come, come, get up. Stop making such a scene.”
“Uh…”
“That’s enough. This is hardly some great event. Surely you’re not putting on a show because you’re from the nobility? Once you entered medical school, you should not expect that kind of special treatment. To begin with, if you had inherited everything you were meant to, you would never have chosen to do this work anyway.”
Ah, still, that did seem a little too harsh.
Anyway, the men of this era were macho to the core.
Is it hard? Endure it. Bear it. Overcome it.
That sort of thing was almost… a virtue? Something like that.
“Now, get up! Stop wallowing.”
“Yes, yes.”
It worked, at least.
Though who knew what he really felt inside.
Anyway, Colin struggled to his feet and headed for the carriage.
His legs were still trembling, of course, and his face was a wreck, but still.
Well… at least Joseph and Alfred aren’t like that.
Fortunately, the two of them looked fine.
“In any case, thank you for coming along. Now I can be certain… that this won’t solve the problem.”
“Ah…”
“Don’t think about it alone. Discuss it with Joseph and Alfred as well. Who knows? One of them might chance upon an idea.”
That was basically saying he hoped a blind cow backing up might step on a frog.
From where I stood, the odds seemed much better if you just threw a stone at the frog and caught it that way.
Even luck needed something to work from.
It was not that I was some bastard who looked down on his friends—it was simply true.
In the end, that meant the burden of thinking it through was mine.
And it was not something I could just ignore.
Premature burial.
Sloppy death pronouncements.
This absolutely had to be fixed.
Hmm… what do I do?
Leaning against the clouded window, riding in the rattling carriage, I continued thinking.
Not just me—everyone had fallen silent.
That did not mean we were all wrestling with the same thoughts.
Even so, it was a heavy silence.
What we had seen at the cemetery had been that shocking.
I shouldn’t have thought of it only that way.
A few days later, faced with one of Blundell’s outrages—not quite an outrage, yet still one all the same—I found myself remembering that time in the carriage.
The doctors of this era were truly like children left too close to the water’s edge; you could not take your eyes off them for even a moment.
If they only got themselves killed, that would almost be the better outcome.
But others…
“Ah.”