Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 620

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 620
Dong! Dong! Dong!
The bell rings out.
The workers who had been felling trees and digging out their roots set down their pickaxes and axes, then begin to move.
“Hey, Wang! It’s lunchtime. Let’s eat and get back to it.”
“Just a moment… this stubborn thing… there we go!”
Thwack!
The man called Wang delivers a final blow to the base of the tree.
Crack!
The tree topples over to the side.
“Phew. Now let’s go eat.”
Wang Geum.
Born as the son of an ordinary farming family, he was now one of the displaced refugees who had drifted into the region designated as Baekrin County.
Like most people of this era.
He had been a tenant farmer, renting land from local magnates and scraping by on sharecropping, so why was he here?
It was because the harvests in his homeland had failed.
A famine had struck, and as a tenant farmer, he could no longer endure the hardship.
Eventually, he fled under cover of night with his family, and drifted to Baekrin County hoping to earn labor wages at the harbor to feed his family—this man was Wang Geum.
For him, this construction project was nothing short of a lifeline dropped from heaven.
They provided all meals.
And they paid generously too. Moreover, if one took part in this work, even refugees would be registered as county residents and issued new household tablets.
Last winter had been quite harsh, so there were quite a few refugees appearing in counties near Baekrin County.
It was natural that most of them threw themselves into this construction project.
Wang Geum had heard the numbers exceeded ten thousand.
Half of them were assigned to road construction and sewage work.
Wang Geum was working at the road construction site.
Bao-ying, the most prosperous town in Baekrin County, was a port city on the lake, renowned for trade and entertainment.
They were constructing a direct road from there to the East Baekrin County office, and simultaneously a direct road to the Baekrin Medical Guild.
The existing roads were being repaired, and new roads were being built where none existed.
The planned construction period was approximately three months!
An enormous undertaking.
Still, after working through one season like this, it seemed he could live comfortably next year, so he had no worries.
“Life has become much easier since coming to Baekrin County.”
“That’s right. The Emperor already cleaned things up once, but the truth is he doesn’t know the details of what happens below.”
“That’s true.”
The commoners eagerly nodded in agreement.
“All the corrupt officials were arrested, and the new officials are said to do their jobs so well.”
“Long live Baekrin Medical Sage, the Illuminator of All Under Heaven, and our Magistrate!”
“Whoa, whoa, where did that come from… isn’t that treason!”
“And the Illuminator of All Under Heaven! What madness possesses our Magistrate Deputy!”
“When you first had it built, didn’t Ilgwang say you were making something strange?”
At those words, Wang Geum’s face flushed crimson as he shouted.
“Oh come on! That’s ancient history! And was it just me? Everyone thought so!”
* * *
Ah, do you not know? This is a waterpump.
That is to say, a manual water pump. And this is a latrine.
A venue to demonstrate these to the officials.
In the past, to draw water, one had to throw a bucket into the village well and haul it up by hand.
Naturally, water spilled as the bucket came up, and the time consumed was enormous.
For the weak and elderly, even drawing water was a great hardship.
And since this was Gangho, tales of poisoning wells always began the conversation.
The greatest problem was precisely this.
Poisoning a well was far too easy.
Assassins would go to such lengths just to eliminate a single Gangho warrior, and no matter how vigilantly the village people stood guard.
A single drop of poison falling in meant silent deaths occurred more than once or twice.
Though poison that merely caused poisoning without greatly altering the taste was expensive, surely it wasn’t as costly as a sect leader’s head?
Moreover, even if the water’s taste changed slightly, only a martial arts novel protagonist would say, “Oh, the water tastes strange. Everyone, stop drinking!”
In reality, with grandmother’s broth, one would hesitate to even mention the seasoning tasting off before already finishing an entire bowl.
When deaths occurred like that, local doctors’ mental states would collapse.
Furthermore, wells were connected to one another, so the poison sometimes spread to neighboring villages.
With no CCTV or household registries here, you couldn’t even identify which assassin did it. The commoners simply died.
The waterpump, by contrast, was a traditional pump device utilizing piston principles, and had been installed quite frequently in our country in the past.
Poison it?
First you’d have to dismantle it, and while it could be done, it was far more complex than a well.
I had the Hao-mun assassins test it, and even if they tried to be quiet, would the waterpump remain quiet?
The moment they started dismantling it, the neighborhood dog would come and bark.
While it couldn’t stop peak-level assassins, it filtered out first-rate ones.
Helen, do you feel it? This is Water. W-a-t-e-r.
Indeed. Helen Keller’s awakening owed something to Teacher Sullivan and the village waterpump.
‘It’s something that disappeared after water pipes were eventually installed in every home, but until then it was quite useful.’
How to use it?
You simply press down.
Of course it requires strength, but far less than hauling up a bucket, making it easier and more sanitary than a well.
“Ohhh, indeed. Quite impressive. But wouldn’t a professional administrator need to keep coming to repair it whenever it breaks, rather than a villager?”
That’s not all.
If managed poorly, this too becomes a culprit of waterborne infectious disease.
In London, poor management of this caused people to die en masse from cholera, and the doctor who uncovered this was named John Snow.
In any case, this will require careful management until we reach the point of one pump per household.
“That’s precisely why administration exists.”
Jin Cheon-hee said so.
“As Baekrin Hyeon has grown, we need more technicians. Personnel replenishment will be the key issue. And we’ll need to reorganize the water supply and sewage management system, so that’s another concern now.”
Even if we can’t install them in every household, we should at least do it by district.
And if one waterpump becomes contaminated and spreads through the water system to other supplies, we’ll need to establish the water infrastructure properly from the start.
‘In the end, since it’s a planned city, we can prepare for these things.’
Fortunately, we have technicians who’ve been with us since the Yeonmu city days, so we can actually construct and install these systems.
The problem is the management personnel….
In the end, I decided that not just the chicks but the veterans would move forward together.
Touching this means building an entirely new planned city—a situation the chicks absolutely cannot handle alone.
This is something the veterans must do.
The chicks need to learn from it.
“Let’s move on to the next item.”
Latrines.
What goes in must come out.
Though in novels, most of it gets deleted for the readers’ mental health.
As living beings, we must eat and excrete, and in this era, toilets are often just two wooden planks placed over a pit.
Public defecation on the streets is common too.
Even Confucius, when he saw someone defecating by the roadside, said nothing—but when he saw someone defecating in the middle of the street, he said even he couldn’t teach that one.
An age where toilets are far away and public sanitation is farther still.
As a result, the stench of cow dung, horse dung, and human waste constantly fills the air.
In well-administered areas, the main roads are swept and cleaned to stay pristine, but in poorly managed areas….
In any case, in this era, young children often die falling into latrines.
If we gathered old ghost stories from our summer horror specials, wouldn’t we find tales of spirits who drowned in toilets?
According to past WHO data, about a billion people worldwide practice open defecation, and 2.4 billion have no toilets in their homes.
If that’s true even in modern times, things here shouldn’t be much different.
‘Fortunately, here we have both the manpower and capital to implement this if we choose to.’
The principle of the latrine itself is surprisingly simple.
It doesn’t require electricity.
Only that, as a toilet, everyone must use it conscientiously and keep it clean….
‘Kehehehe! I am the Magistrate! This is the power of authority!’
I’ll make sure everyone washes their hands when leaving the toilet.
Anyone who puts strange things in the latrine hole will be caught and scolded!
And all the waste collected this way will be reprocessed and systematically converted into fertilizer!
Just thinking about burning every last parasite egg to make it, the Doctor’s heart raced with excitement.
“First priority is placing two or three latrines per district. The ultimate goal is one in every household.”
This is the method used in developing countries.
With flush toilets, human waste cannot be recycled as fertilizer, so we won’t use them at this stage.
For now, we dig deep toilet pits, coat the bottom cleanly with concrete, install piping to prevent maggots and flies from crawling up, and then place a large reinforced box inside so we can easily and conveniently remove the waste.
The ultimate goal is to have one in every household.
Once we reach that point, public sanitation will advance much further.
If it had gone that far, public sanitation would have developed much further.
‘And to sustain it, I’ll need to keep redirecting administrative personnel.’
And that budget…
“In truth, this is only possible because we have the funds.”
Jin Cheon-hee opened his mouth.
“We’ll start with a trial installation, and for commoners who wish to install one in their own homes, we’ll reduce their taxes.”
This too was only possible because we had the budget.
Interestingly, it was the Golden Blood Hall that began installations first.
Latrines started being installed in the large inns belonging to the Golden Blood Hall.
In the past, even inns weren’t much different from ordinary homes in terms of sanitation facilities, but with latrine installation, people could now use toilets far more hygienically.
Surprisingly, these were flush toilets.
Using the pressure differential of siphon tubes and the principle of leverage, they were surprisingly proper flush toilets.
The downside was that water had to be manually replenished continuously.
Since water pipes weren’t laid out like in modern times, water had to be drawn and carried—there was no helping that.
But how clean they were!
Enforcing sanitation through authority! Let’s achieve a hygienic society!
Of course, there was the drawback that accumulated waste couldn’t be sent directly to the river, but had to be filtered through a four-stage septic system.
‘Well, in this era people do scatter their waste directly into rivers.’
If we continued that way, we’d experience another plague outbreak, so I decided to adopt the methods used in Yeonmu City wholesale.
Of course, there were warriors who threw tantrums, unable to adapt to the noise the flushing made, but it seemed Sama Hyeon and his Hao-mun organization were managing them quite well in their own “heterodox” way.
After all, there was no danger of assassins hiding in traditional outhouses and stabbing you.
Apparently that’s a fairly common assassination method in Gangho?
‘My goodness, they’re installing them faster than I’m even bringing them in.’
We were still working on reducing the noise the flushing made.
The newcomer officials marveled with bright eyes.
“Oh, I’d like to have one installed in my home too.”
“With this, we won’t have to hear creaking sounds at night, so it might be less frightening.”
“It’s quite hygienic. I’m impressed.”
The veteran officials’ perspective was different.
“To do this, we need to figure out how many feet of ground we’ll have to dig, and you want us to handle all that maintenance?”
“So you’re saying we need to redo the entire district layout?”
“We’d need to start with foundation work—have you already discussed this with the craftsmen?”
“Who will allocate the related budget?”
“How often should we handle waste disposal, and who should we ask about that? Magistrate?”
That was it.
The seasoned veterans who’d experienced everything calculated the workload that would come pouring in.
The paperwork that would immediately pile up took priority over defecating in a clean place.
Still, in a rigid Confucian society like a cliff face, the very fact that they asked about workload instead of being yes-men was a considerable achievement in itself.
Baek Rin County paid good salaries, and in a world where there was no medical insurance and you simply died if you fell ill, being able to live without worrying about medical expenses was a major advantage.
The downside, unlike other counties, was that they had to push hard on civil engineering, construction, and mathematics.
“Are you saying to install the treadle-type manual water pumps by drilling down to groundwater, or by laying water pipes first and then connecting them?”
“Looking at the cross-section, I can see there’s a filtration device installed, but sourcing the materials….”
Jin Cheon-hee spoke brightly.
“Yes, please ask your questions.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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