The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 9 - Chapter 11

Chapter 11: The Dissection

The weather had begun to get warmer and the butterbur had blown its edible buds when Maomao and the apprentice physicians were brought to a dark, dank spot.

“Finally time for the real deal, huh?” Tianyu said flippantly. He was the only one who had the wherewithal to act unintimidated; the other apprentices were all pale-faced. Once in a while they would shoot Maomao looks that said, What are you doing here? but they refrained from actually saying anything. Maomao had weathered plenty of these looks while they dissected animals together. She wasn’t about to let it bother her now.

Well, it wasn’t quite true that no one said anything.

“Someone’s getting very special treatment,” remarked Tianyu. As frivolous as he might seem, he had an iron nerve. When they had been dissecting livestock, he’d been the calmest of them all. He might not take to classroom learning as readily as the other students, but his composure made him a more gifted practitioner than the others. Indeed, he was very good.

“If you want to call it that,” Maomao replied.

“Ooh. I’m jealous.”

Maomao was starting to think Tianyu couldn’t stay calm unless he was talking to someone. Most of the other apprentices were too nervous during the practical work to talk to anyone, let alone Maomao, but Tianyu seemed to prattle at her relentlessly.

“If my treatment’s really so special, maybe I could get one of those white coats.”

“Ooh, don’t think that’s possible, Niang-niang.”

It’s Maomao! Was he doing this on purpose? Whatever; it would be too much work to set him straight, so she let it be.

To be fair, she could see where Tianyu was coming from. Special treatment, huh? Guess I can’t really blame anyone for accusing me of that. Under normal circumstances, Maomao would never have walked this dim, dank hallway in the doctors’ company. As to where the hallway led—it was the room where executed criminals were placed in repose. The doctors were using a special passageway so that no one would see them go there.

It was not, however, the first time Maomao had used it. No, that had been when she’d gone to see whether Suirei was really dead. Suirei, who was now living with the former consort Ah-Duo. Kind of wish she could’ve learned surgery too.

Once, on the way to the western capital, she’d helped Maomao treat some injured guards, and had proven unflappable even though the treatment had involved, among other things, amputating a human arm. She would’ve done great here.

I guess the circumstances of her birth would have made it impossible, Maomao thought. While it wasn’t officially acknowledged, Suirei was the former emperor’s granddaughter. She was also a member of the exterminated Shi clan, so although her life had been spared, she was fated to remain in the shadows as long as she lived.

Such a waste. There was nothing Maomao could do but lament it. Anything else was far beyond her power. One might think, then, that perhaps Suirei should have stayed dead—but that would be an affront. One could not forget that there was another girl who had staged a once-in-a-lifetime performance so that Suirei could live.

“So, who’s backing your participation here?” Tianyu asked. Very direct.

“Are you accusing me of nepotism?” Maomao asked—the same thing of which she had been suspected when she’d first joined the staff at the medical office.

“No. I think it’s something bigger than that. Men’s intuition.”

This son of a...

How could Tianyu act so frothy and yet be so perceptive? It would be bad for everyone if he sniffed out Jinshi’s involvement here.

“I’m telling En’en,” Maomao said instead.

“She’s not here, so how could you tell her?” Tianyu replied. So much for throwing him off the subject—but it bought her exactly enough time. They had arrived at their destination.

“Here,” Dr. Liu said, pointing to a door at the end of the hallway. It opened with a great, heavy creaking, unleashing a fresh blast of damp, humid air.

I smell alcohol, thought Maomao. It should have been a comfort to her—she loved spirits—but she just wasn’t in the mood to drink at that moment. Lying on a cot in the middle of the room was a man, face up and completely naked. Bruises from a rope marked his neck. He was a criminal, executed by hanging, and the smell of alcohol was probably because the body had been wiped down.

“We’ll put on smocks, but try not to get them dirty if you can help it,” Dr. Liu said. Maomao took the apron she was given and put it on. She was also handed a white bandanna, not to tie back her hair, but to put over her face, covering everything below the eyes. Dr. Liu continued, “I’m going to do the cutting. You’re going to watch me, and you’re going to burn every organ, every layer of tissue, into your memory.” He was already holding a dissecting knife. “I want you to remember every single thing you see here.” His tone was downright threatening.

They had been warned ahead of time not to take any notes. The very fact that Dr. Liu was here, teaching them this, was supposedly something that could not happen. The only thing they could take with them from this place was whatever they could remember.

So it comes down to a conflict between public morals and medical progress. The physicians’ compromise was not to do anything too openly.

The small, sharp knife slid easily into the body’s portly abdomen. It wasn’t enough to make blood spurt, but at the same time, the flesh wasn’t stiff; Dr. Liu appeared to have chosen a body in which the rigor mortis had worn off. He laid open the corpse and began showing them the internal organs, which were much easier to see than they had been on the freshly slaughtered livestock. Working with an actual human corpse, however, hit a little close to home. The students were by now accustomed to working with animals, but even so a couple of them put their hands to their mouths.

“This is the heart, here. Under no circumstances should you cut the large blood vessels connected to it,” Dr. Liu told them. Then he continued through the organs. “The stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine. These comprise the digestive tract. You should recognize them; we’ve made enough sausages from intestines.”

They’d done it on his orders, in fact; he’d told them their animals were not to be wasted. The sausages had been delicious, but it looked like a few of the apprentices might never be able to eat another one again.

“Here are the reproductive organs. I’ll call you the moment they execute a female prisoner. The reproductive organs take a substantially different form in women, needless to say.” By this point in her life Maomao, of course, was neither surprised nor scandalized by the sight of male genitalia. “Can anyone tell me what disease this man suffered from?” Dr. Liu asked them.

Not sure how we’re supposed to tell, Maomao thought. The man had been dead for days, meaning the color of his skin was no longer a reliable guide to his condition. She thought she could make out some splotches, and although this was her first time seeing the internal organs of a human up close, she thought she could make a guess.

No one else seemed willing to answer, so she ventured, “Was it a disease of the liver, sir?” Maomao wasn’t eager to stand out too much, but somebody had to answer or they would be stuck here forever.

“What’s your basis for suggesting that?” Dr. Liu asked.

“I can’t shake the sense that the color of his liver is poor compared to the animals we’ve worked with. There are also some yellow discolorations on his skin, and jaundice is a good indicator of liver problems.”

Yao had the same symptom.

“Passing marks for you. This man got drunk and turned violent. He picked a fight with another customer at the bar and ended up killing him. His own mother tried to stop him, and he killed her too. As a matter of fact, he’d just been released from prison for a previous offense, and he was out of second chances.”

Hence the hanging.

“As would be more obvious if we could line this up against a healthy liver, this one is noticeably inflamed. Excessive alcohol use is typically the culprit, but sometimes it can be contaminated by the blood, so be careful not to get any cuts or injuries on your hands while working with something like this. The poison can get into your body through the wound and make you sick.”

Dr. Liu’s tone was so intimidating that even Tianyu didn’t have a smart remark. In fact, his eyes were wide; he studied the organ intently. He seemed to show an unanticipated serious streak when they were actually at work.

Maomao looked much like him: she was staring hard at the dissected body, taking it all in, making sure she didn’t miss a word the doctor said, intimidating or not.

When their “special class” was over, the students changed and headed for the bathhouse. They went to one right next to a temple—one imagined that the bathhouse had started as a place for clergy to purify themselves, but by now the establishment demanded secular currency.

The baths were divided by gender, not mixed, and here in the middle of the day the place wasn’t very busy, but nonetheless the changing room felt cramped. Even so, the closely packed shelves probably had room for fifteen sets of clothes. There were a number of bathhouses in the capital, and if this wasn’t the most lavish, it was clean and well-maintained.

“Phew...” The water was good and hot, and the other bathers were few and far between—in Maomao’s mind, this was paradise.

The students had been told they could go home after they washed up, so she would take the time to clean her hair today. She washed off the clinging feel of the dampness and the dark. It mattered so much to have these moments when you could simply soak in the bath and think about nothing.

It sucks that we couldn’t write anything down, she thought. But if they did, their notes would constitute forbidden books in their own right.

Today they had only observed, but in the future Maomao and the others would be expected to do the dissection themselves. Maomao had been surprised by how calm and rational she had remained in the presence of a corpse. Maybe it’s because I’d never seen him before. Because he was a criminal. Because I could tell myself it was his own fault he died.

Would she have been able to do the same if it had been someone she knew? Or perhaps it helped that they were cutting not into a live person, but only something that had formerly been a person.

Maomao thought of Luomen’s hidden book. He’d said that it was his teacher on the last page. She hadn’t looked very old, though, not in his drawings. I can’t imagine how he felt when he was making those illustrations. What must Luomen’s teacher have meant to him?

Just as Maomao was letting out another sigh, some young women came into the bath.

“Think they’d take me?” one of them said.

“Sure! Definitely,” the other replied.

Maomao listened, wondering what they were talking about.

“I heard they haven’t put out a call in a long time, though. You know, for ladies for the rear palace?”

“That’s exactly it! They must be getting low on numbers. Now’s your chance!”

A call for ladies for the rear palace? Maomao frowned thoughtfully. Hadn’t Jinshi said that Gyoku-ou’s daughter, Empress Gyokuyou’s niece, was going to enter the palace? Even if they had found a way to postpone it. So they do ask for volunteers.

Such a young woman couldn’t have exclusively ladies-in-waiting from the western capital around her; and anyway, she was the child of someone very important and influential.

“Everyone talks about the Crown Prince, but the Emperor only has two sons right now. Plenty of chances to find your place. Can’t have too many sons, right?”

Wow! This young lady had ambition. She was planning not only to enter the rear palace as a palace woman, but to become the Emperor’s bedmate and even a mother of the nation.

If you’re gonna dream, dream big.

Even if, Maomao figured, things would end up very differently from what the woman expected. She nodded her head, causing droplets of water to fall from her sopping bangs. That reminds me. She knew they would be leaving for the western capital before this new consort arrived, but she still hadn’t heard an exact date. For that matter, she didn’t even know who else would be coming with them.

I’ll ask him next time, she thought, and then she heaved herself out of the bath and headed for the changing room.