“I’m sorry to tell you there’s no poison in the tea today,” Hulan said apologetically.
“Yes, what a shame. It would make Miss Maomao so happy, and give the Moon Prince such a fine excuse to execute you,” Chue said.
“My dear older sister Chue. You’re so cruel to me.”
Sparks flew between Chue and Hulan even more than between Hulan and Maomao. It evidently wasn’t the first time this had happened; Basen’s expression clearly said, Again?
The discussion was never going to get anywhere at this rate. Maomao looked at Jinshi. He looked back with unusual seriousness. “Before we go any further, there’s something I want to say to you, Maomao.”
“What is it, sir?”
“First, calm down.”
“I am calm, sir.”
“Don’t fuss.”
“I’m not fussing, sir.”
“Steady yourself.”
“I’m steady, sir.”
“You’re ready now?”
“Yes, sir.”
After all that, Maomao was fairly sure she was actually calm—until the moment Jinshi took out a paulownia-wood box and opened the lid, revealing battered old pages sitting on top of some white paper.
“This is from the restored Kada’s Book,” he said.
“Ka...da...?” Maomao went still for an instant, and then she exploded: “Whhhooooooaaaaaa!”
Yes, she’d known. She’d understood what they were there for. And yet on hearing the name, she couldn’t restrain her excitement.
“She’s not very calm,” Tianyu said.
“Dignity, Miss Maomao!” Chue added. They both turned to stare at her.
Maomao immediately reached for the battered book, but Jinshi slapped her hand away.
“Wh-Whyyy?!”
“Look at it—this is after we restored it! If you just grab it in a fit of rapture, you’ll destroy it, and then no one will be able to read it!”
“Of course, sir, I know that. I’ll be gentle with it. So please, please, please, pretty please let me see it!”
Maomao straightened up and looked at Jinshi with her most serious expression. With no small amount of trepidation, he handed her the book.
“It looks like it was originally bound like a sutra,” she observed.
“Indeed. We cut it apart so it would be easier to repair.”
Sutra construction was also called a folded book. As the name implied, it was made by folding the paper over.
Maomao studied the restored book intently. Tianyu trotted over, but she shoved him aside; he was just getting in the way.
Does it have anything about smallpox?
The book was a hundred years old, so the characters were considerably different from the way they were written today. They were also faded in places, making the text supremely difficult to read. Notwithstanding those hurdles, however, she definitely wanted to read this book.
“There. It talks about the smallpox outbreak a hundred years ago,” she said. It was what she happened to be interested in at the moment, so she seized on it immediately. Tianyu, meanwhile, wasn’t particularly moved; smallpox wasn’t dissection, after all.
What mattered in medicine was quantity of case studies and records of attempted treatments. Anything showing repeated attempts—and often repeated failures—to treat a disease would help bring future medicine closer to the right path. That’s what made these old pages so important.
And details there were: how the disease had spread, how it had been treated.
Let’s see, they dealt with it by...
But the page happened to be cut off right where Maomao might have found the answer to her question. They must not have restored that part of it yet.
“Are these all the pages you have?” she asked.
“The rest are still being repaired. Would you like to see for yourself?” Jinshi stood up and crooked a finger at them to follow him. They left the office, but they didn’t go far—only about two rooms down the hall.
“What’s this?” Maomao asked. The room was filled with a distinctive, pleasant humidity and suffused with the scent of paper.
There was hardly anyone there—one person at the door and another within, working. Considering that it was after hours, these people must have received special permission to be here. They were dipping the paper into what appeared to be water and endeavoring to peel apart stuck pages.
The fire that provided illumination wavered. It was surrounded by metal to make sure the flames couldn’t catch any of the paper—a wise choice under the circumstances.
That does not look like easy work, Maomao thought—but the men had been told to work fast, so work fast they would.
“We’re having it specially restored, but given what’s in this book, we can’t exactly have a crowd of people working on it. As you can see, it’s rather...small-scale in here,” Jinshi said. Neither the contents of the book nor its author could be made public. “The in-progress work is here.”
Maomao’s eyes shimmered, but no matter how she squinted, she couldn’t read the pages. The paper was yellowed and the characters had begun to run; by the flickering firelight, they almost looked hazy. As poor a shape as the pages Jinshi had shown them earlier had been in, it was painfully clear how much work had been done to make them more readable.
“The pictures are pretty easy to see,” Tianyu said, and Maomao looked at the other pages currently under repair.
The pages had been lined up one beside the other. They were weathered, with stains and smudged characters, but there were also pictures depicting what appeared to be a human body.
“Oooh!” Maomao said, her eyes making perfect circles.
There were detailed illustrations of medicinal herbs. The most prominent one, however, was of a dissection. It showed the insides of a person in great detail. It was smudged in places, but easier to make out than the writing.
Tianyu said this was one of his ancestors, right?
It was a living demonstration of just how thick blood could be. Tianyu was poring over the illustration, making sounds of amazement. Maomao, too, stared fixedly at it.
She didn’t say anything.
He didn’t say anything.
Chue didn’t say anything.
“Somebody say something!” Jinshi demanded, looking straight at Maomao.
“Sorry, sir,” she replied, her eyes still glued to the pages.
What was more, as far as she could tell from the picture, unlike the earlier pages, this one dealt with diseases of the internal organs, and it mentioned typhlitis. Maybe that explained why Tianyu was as silent as Maomao.
At length she told Jinshi, “This is a very interesting book.”
“I can’t say I find it very engaging,” Jinshi said, squinting at the picture of the autopsy.
“They may have ignored common morals to do it, but they didn’t do it by half measures—that’s what makes the outcome so intriguing.”
“And you can sleep at night, thinking like that?” Jinshi shot back.
As Maomao looked at the image of a human being lying there in pieces, she contemplated how different the value of a human life had been a hundred years before. It appeared that if the surgery had been successful, the authors wrote down its subsequent progress, while if it failed, they autopsied the body and made illustrations of it.
They didn’t waste anything.
“Do you think their patients were slaves?” she asked.
“It’s a likely possibility.”
Cutting open someone’s belly was almost unthinkable. Even a dead person had to be treated with respect. That, at least, was the common consensus.
In practice, the only people doctors cut up to learn more about how humans were built were criminals. In the same way, if they were going to do experimental surgery, outside of extraordinary circumstances it was unlikely that they would use ordinary people. Maomao didn’t know what had passed for “common sense” at the time, but it seemed plausible that the physicians would have been using criminals or possibly slaves in their research.
The only reason it had been permitted to cut open the Empress Dowager’s belly to give birth to the current Emperor was because in the worst-case scenario, she was going to die anyway. When Maomao had helped perform a similar procedure for Xiaohong in the western capital, it was because the girl had been on death’s doorstep. Maomao understood very well why Xiaohong’s mother had objected so strenuously.
But what about now?
“Are you cutting them open and removing the filth?”
“Have you learned to read minds since I saw you last, Niangniang?”
The exchange implied that Tianyu was already operating on living people.
In the late stages of typhlitis...
The mortality rate was high. By taking out the filth that had collected in the body, they might be able to improve symptoms at least slightly. Hence there would be no real sense that surgery was the wrong move, but she was taken aback that they would use a newly minted physician like Tianyu to do the job. From the color of his fingertips, she got the impression that it wasn’t just once or twice that he had done this procedure.
I admit, there’s no question about his ability, but still.
She felt like this was more surgeries than would normally be allotted simply to polish a young doctor’s skills. He probably wasn’t limited to patients who had come from Maomao’s clinic.
It’s like they’re trying to get him as much experience as possible, as fast as they can.
The suspicion had been growing in her mind since seeing the drug trials, and now it came close to certainty.
There in the book repair room, she was with Jinshi, Chue, and Tianyu. Basen stood guard not far away. Maomao thought Chue was being awfully quiet; she looked over and discovered she had a long piece of candy.
“Can we eat in here?” Maomao asked.
“My huthban gabe it to me,” Chue replied. So Baryou had been in the office. He knew to give her some candy to keep her quiet—he really was her husband.
Can I bring up this subject here? Maomao wondered. She looked around at those present and pondered how far she should speak. She would have preferred not to talk about it in front of Tianyu.
She said nothing, and time passed.