The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 43

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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 43
William’s hands, disinfected with alcohol and still damp, stepped between the mother’s legs without waiting for them to dry.
The drape had been discarded long ago.
There was no time for modesty or shame.
They were already dancing on the line of death.
“What should I do?”
Helen asked.
Allan answered at once, positioning his weight over the mother’s abdomen.
“You must lift the fetus’s legs and torso. Keep them at a slight angle above horizontal. If you raise them too high, you’ll strain the neck—be careful.”
“I know. Don’t worry.”
Helen was composed.
She wrapped the slippery infant in a dry cloth, gripping it firmly, then carefully lifted the body to clear the path.
Decades of experience guided her hands to find, by instinct alone, the optimal angle for the forceps to advance.
But William was different.
His hands trembled shamefully with extreme tension.
“Steady. Please. Steady.”
He whispered it to himself.
Helen’s heavy hand gripped his shoulder.
“Young man, get a hold of yourself. Two lives hang on your hands right now. Fear is a luxury you cannot afford.”
William drew a deep breath—hah—and barely recovered his composure.
Allan placed both hands above the pubic bone, pressing down hard to prevent the fetus’s head from tilting upward, and gave the signal.
“Insert.”
William gripped the forceps handle with his left hand.
He pushed two fingers of his right hand deep into the vagina, but it was far more constricted than he’d anticipated.
The cervix was clamped tight around the baby’s neck.
Forcing metal through that gap was like shoving a lever through the crack of a locked door.
“…It won’t go. The space is too narrow.”
Despair crept back into William’s voice.
Allan called out sharply.
“Widen the cervical opening with your fingers! Force a passage if you must!”
William clenched his teeth, pouring strength into his fingertips as he forcibly pried open the space between the baby’s head and birth canal.
The blade of the forceps scraped the vaginal wall and pressed forward with a dull rasp.
In the darkness, he relied entirely on the sensation at his fingertips, feeling along the baby’s cheekbone.
“Left blade secured.”
William exhaled in barely restrained relief.
Without a word, Helen tilted the fetus to the opposite side, clearing space for the second blade.
Allan monitored the mother’s pulse while acutely observing the state of her uterus.
“Inserting the right blade.”
It caught.
The forceps snagged on the pubic bone.
William’s eyes squeezed shut.
Eyes closed, he twisted the blade minutely, probing for the angle of entry.
Helen watched the color of the infant’s limbs.
They were turning blue.
Yet she said nothing.
She would not add even a grain of burden to a young man already giving everything.
After a long struggle, the right blade finally enclosed the baby’s head.
The two handles of the forceps, crossed in an X, met at their ends.
William tried to align them at the midline, but because the baby’s head was lodged at an angle, the handles remained offset.
Seeing this, Helen adjusted the child’s position slightly.
At the same moment, William twisted his wrist, rotating the handles into place.
Click.
A sharp metallic sound cut through the silence of the delivery room.
At last the forceps locked.
William lifted his sweat-soaked face.
“N-now I’ll…pull.”
“Wait. The uterus still isn’t contracted. When I give the signal, then you pull.”
Allan pressed firmly on the fundus of the uterus, drawing out an artificial contraction.
The moment the mother’s abdominal muscles tightened with a cry of pain, Allan shouted.
“Now! Pull!”
William drew the forceps slowly, but without pause.
Following the curve of the birth canal, the trajectory arced from horizontal to a broad sweep toward the mother’s abdomen.
Allan matched that motion, pressing down from above as though to crush the mother’s pubic bone, driving the baby’s head downward.
Allan pushing from above, William pulling from below—a perfect synchronized assault.
Helen moved between them, her hands steady, maintaining the delicate angle of the child’s body to keep the neck from bending.
“The head’s moving.”
As Helen’s trembling voice broke the silence, the heavy resistance beneath her fingertips vanished as though it had never been.
The baby’s head, having passed through the gateway of the pelvis, slipped free through the birth canal.
“It’s out!”
Helen caught the child in cloth and flipped it over with urgent hands.
Allan and William rushed to crowd around her.
The baby’s face was drained of all color—a sickly blue.
‘Cry. Please cry.’
Every sound in the delivery room seemed to cease.
One second. Two seconds. Three.
In that silence so suffocating she could not draw breath, Helen cleared the child’s mouth and rough-scrubbed its back—and then:
“Waah! Waah-waah-waah!”
A first cry, raw and piercing, struck the ceiling.
“There we are! A healthy son, and strong.”
Helen wrapped the child in swaddling cloth and broke into a radiant smile.
“Hah…”
Only then did William’s legs give way beneath him, and he sank to the floor.
His palms, soaked with sweat and blood, trembled against his knees.
Allan clapped him gently on the shoulder.
“You did it, William. Truly remarkable work.”
Meanwhile Helen was placing the child in the mother’s arms.
Even through the haze of exhaustion, a faint smile crossed the mother’s lips.
The mother turned to look at William and Allan.
She said nothing, but her eyes spoke gratitude clearly.
* * *
After the delivery was done.
Helen stood on the balcony.
In her hand she held a pipe, tobacco crammed tightly into its bowl.
She stood at the railing, gazing out into Danford’s darkness, and brought the pipe to her lips.
Then she patted her chest.
She had no matches.
“Damn it.”
The curse escaped her.
Then, overcome by sudden exhaustion, she let out a short laugh.
Just then, she felt a presence beside her.
“Do you need a light?”
It was Allan Wright, the young man in the brown coat.
Helen regarded him for a moment, then held out the pipe.
Allan struck a match and lit it for her.
Then he leaned against the railing, his gaze too turning out toward Danford’s darkness.
Helen stood beside him, drawing on the pipe.
For a time they stood in silence.
“Thank you.”
The words came out rough.
“Without you two, I’d have lost the child.”
“I did little. My colleague did most of the work.”
“But you controlled the situation. That cannot be taught through technique alone. It’s something beyond mere knowledge.”
Helen exhaled smoke into the air.
The gray plume dissolved into the darkness, then dispersed.
“I’ve done this work for forty years. Delivered near every child born in Danford.”
…
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve trained successors. Girls who would have begged on the streets or sold themselves otherwise. To raise them as midwives—how noble, how good a thing it is. To catch a life with these hands.”
Helen’s lips twitched slightly.
“But now those forty years are crumbling. I don’t want to admit it, yet it’s true. I am a relic of the past. You and yours are the rising ones.”
“Midwife.”
Allan spoke softly.
“We seek to complement each other, not for one of us to replace or devour the other.”
“That’s what you say. But you may not even know if you mean it.”
Helen turned her head, fixing Allan with a clear, steady gaze.
“But will others see it that way?”
“There’s no answer if we frame it as a matter of superiority and inferiority, midwife. Certainly we are competitors working in the same market, but ultimately we are medical practitioners cooperating toward a single purpose, are we not?”
Helen let out a thin laugh.
She understood.
She truly did.
It was simply that her heart refused to follow.
That an old pair of hands—hands that had guarded Danford’s birthing room for forty years—should now pass the work to young men.
That wounded pride was the greatest problem of all.
“Getting old, I suppose—nothing but stubborn sullenness now. Just showing my narrow heart for all to see.”
“Let the midwives handle ordinary deliveries, and should a difficult labor arise, contact us. That way we can save more infants.”
“I’ve already made up my mind to do it. Can’t lose a child like we saw today.”
Helen spoke with her lips pressed firmly together.
Forceps.
She had always regarded them as nothing more than metal that hastened the work nature was meant to do.
She had even thought them dangerous to the child.
And yet she could not deny it.
That when used well, they truly could save a child in mortal peril.
Allan, watching her, dropped his words like stones.
“As I mentioned before, should you ever wish to learn the forceps, you would be welcome at any time.”
“…Is that a sincere offer?”
“Why not? It’s all about saving lives. Shouldn’t we prevent deaths that occur simply because no one knows how to use forceps?”
Helen regarded him with an expression of stunned disbelief.
But soon her lips curled downward in a bitter line.
“Soft words. Even now, the surgeons treat us midwives as ‘ignorant old women who rely on nothing but experience and presume to practice.’ My generation will muddle through. But one day, you lot will turn on us.”
Acrid smoke drifted between them as she exhaled.
“What difference does learning forceps make? The moment those surgeon fellows file a complaint in the Guild’s name, saying ‘unqualified persons using surgical instruments,’ what power do we have? We’ll simply be silenced and pushed aside.”
It was a statement weighted with helplessness.
Even though they had saved the child together, Helen’s fear—that the surgeons would replace the midwives—had not departed with the dawn.
Allan, who had been listening quietly, answered in a low voice.
“Then we must open that closed mouth.”
“……?”
“When they accuse you of ignorance, meet them in the language they speak. And that language is anatomy.”
“……!”
“If there are midwives among you with the will to learn, I would be glad to teach them pelvic floor anatomy. If you understand the structure of the pelvis academically and handle the instruments on that foundation, they won’t dare frame you as charlatans. You’ll have a weapon to claim your profession with confidence—one rooted in genuine expertise.”
Helen withdrew her pipe from her lips and stared at Allan in bewilderment.
“Are you too noble, or simply ignorant of how the world works?”
“Rather, having found myself in a similar position, I’ve come to understand a few things, and so I’m offering this counsel.”
Physician and surgeon.
Once, the surgeon was no better than a barber—a lowly craftsman.
Lumped together with quacks and charlatans.
That such a surgeon could now stand against the physician and have his voice heard was because he had seized anatomy as a weapon and proven his own expertise.
The struggle he had cried out—to break free from the physician’s regulation—still continued to this day.
‘When I was a physician, I cursed surgeons as quacks who spoke nonsense without truly understanding the body. I insisted the physician must have the right to regulate the surgeon.’
What the physician had done to the surgeon, the surgeon would now do to the midwife.
It was how practitioners encroached upon each other’s domains and expanded their markets.
That great tide of the age—he could not stem it alone.
The midwife and surgeon would struggle against each other, and in the end the surgeon might prevail.
Armed with knowledge, law, and regulation.
Yet at least here in Danford, they might still coexist in peace.

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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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