The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 47

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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 47
Several days had passed.
The day after Allen performed surgery on the Patient Child in Green Hills, the silver surgical tubes he’d commissioned from the Silversmith Craftsman arrived.
Curved tubes arranged by size—from those for infants to larger ones for older children.
And a small retractor to hold open the incision when inserting the tube, exactly as Allen had drawn it.
“Quite skilled work.”
Edward held one of the tubes up to the light, marveling at it.
But William, who had accompanied the craftsman back, shook his head.
“If you’ve seen the drawings Allen made, you’ll understand that the craftsman simply hammered away as instructed.”
The instruments were in place.
Yet patients multiplied faster than instruments could be forged.
The frightening truth was that they were increasing invisibly.
At first, it was merely a sore throat.
Low fever and a scratching pain in the throat.
No parent brought such ailments to a surgeon.
In those times, if a cold worsened even considerably, one simply kept the child at home and fed them water—that was the natural course.
This meant that the patients Edward’s Clinic saw were, inevitably, children whose conditions had progressed to critical stages.
Children with gray, tough membranes accumulating inside the throat, breathing sounds that turned to a barking cough, necks so swollen that the boundary between jaw and shoulder vanished.
Those for whom only a breath’s distance remained between life and death.
When Edward stood before the second patient, he quietly handed the scalpel to Allen.
“Standing as an assistant won’t help you improve. Moreover, this surgery came from your mind, not mine. You must take the surgeon’s place—only then will you see what remains hidden.”
Allen stared down at the scalpel and swallowed dryly.
Yet Edward was right.
Without grasping the blade, one could never become a fine surgeon, always hiding behind the excuse of “I’m still clumsy.”
“…I understand.”
With trembling hands, Allen took the scalpel and traced the midline of the child’s neck.
While Edward wiped away the flowing blood with gauze, Allen separated the muscle fibers and probed for the airway.
Yet even as his fingers went deeper than expected, those cartilage rings refused to come within his grasp.
Just as anxiety began to close in, something hard and white caught against his fingertips.
Allen believed he had at last found the wall of the airway.
“I found it. I can feel the cartilage.”
The moment he shifted his grip on the scalpel to bore the opening, Edward’s face—positioned to maintain the operative field—went deathly pale.
Edward seized Allen’s wrist with crushing force and cried out.
“Stop! That’s a cervical vertebra!!!”
In an instant, Allen’s mind went blank white.
His fingertips had slipped infinitesimally from the midline.
Bypassing the lateral wall of the airway entirely, passing clean through the passage itself, he had been touching the anterior surface of the spinal vertebra at the very back of the neck with his blade.
Edward quickly seized the scalpel, deftly repositioned along the midline, and finished the surgery.
That night, when Allen returned to the clinic, he was deeply despondent.
Edward and William sat beside him and did their best to offer consolation.
“Listen here, Allen. He’s only a child. It’s different from an adult. The airway itself is so slender and narrow that even a slight deviation from the midline is entirely possible.”
“That’s right, sir. Even if I had held the knife, it would have made no difference. Anyone could make such a mistake. Please don’t torment yourself over it.”
Yet Allen’s self-recrimination would not cease.
“How could I have simply continued until I touched the cervical vertebra? It lies deeper than the carotid artery and esophagus—how thoughtlessly must I have been digging to…”
Edward scratched his head awkwardly.
The child had been somewhat plump, which made the airway difficult to locate by external touch alone; even he, observing carefully, had failed to correct it in time.
That night Allen lit candles and sat awake, reconstructing the sensation in his fingertips and running through every conceivable anatomical scenario.
The next morning, Edward was taken aback when he saw Allen’s haggard, hollow-eyed face.
“Surely you haven’t been dwelling on this all night?”
“…More or less.”
“Blast it all. If there’s surgery today, I’ll have William assist instead.”
As it happened, there was surgery that very day.
When they went to operate on a three-year-old Patient Child, this time Edward found himself at an impasse.
A three-year-old’s neck was so delicate that even pointing with a finger required caution.
Edward was in the midst of bringing the blade to the skin, separating the muscle.
“Edward! The child’s face—!”
Allen, who had been holding the head steady, cried out urgently.
Cyanosis.
The airway, pushed to its limit, had completely closed during the surgery.
The child’s complexion was darkening to a bruised purple, and the chest that had been heaving suddenly went still.
When I pressed my hand to his neck, the pulse was slowing rapidly.
“He’s stopped breathing! The pulse is weakening!”
Edward’s pupils trembled.
The incision was flooded with blood; the airway was invisible.
There was no time to cut through muscle and probe for cartilage.
If I couldn’t get air into him in the next thirty seconds, the child wouldn’t survive.
Edward’s hand fumbled through the instrument case.
What he found was not a surgical tube, but a hollow silver needle—the kind used to drain fluid—thick and blunt.
‘Whatever it takes.’
He drove the needle vertically into the place where the airway should be.
His hands had moved before his mind could catch up.
Pshhh—!
Through the needle’s tip, trapped air escaped in a turbid rush, along with blood.
The needle had pierced the trachea.
As a handful of air moved through the needle, the stilled chest stirred faintly once more.
Color returned to the blue-tinged lips.
The worst had passed.
Edward continued the surgery with the needle securing the airway, his hands trembling violently.
He split the cartilage beside the needle and pushed in the smallest silver curved tube. Then it was over.
When Edward returned after handing the child back to his parents, he sank into a chair and barely spoke for the rest of the night.
“You worked so hard today. The Patient Child lives because of you, Edward.”
Allen handed him warm wine and offered comfort.
But Edward shook his head firmly.
“I remembered what you did, sir. That time you saved a man’s life at the tavern.”
……
“Next time, I fear we’ll lose someone. We can’t succeed forever. This is walking a knife’s edge.”
Neither of them had ever performed a tracheotomy on an adult, let alone led one themselves.
To perform such surgery—in a place without proper lighting, without anesthesia, on a thrashing infant in agony.
It was all but impossible.
When Edward returned from performing the Tracheotomy on the fourth Patient Child, Dunford was sinking deeper into the plague’s grip.
The streets had noticeably emptied, and shops were closing from early afternoon onward.
Every alley reeked of sulfur and incense as residents burned them to ward off disease.
People were beginning to understand that this calamity was not a simple pharyngitis or cold.
Rumors spread that a neighbor’s child had started a dry cough and three days later, unable to breathe, had died.
The name “Angel’s Wing Plague” or “Croup disease” passed from mouth to mouth, along with terror.
The entire city felt as though it were suffocating.
“Edward, we need the Surgeons’ Assembly.”
On the way back that day, Allen spoke to Edward.
“We should gather the tracheotomy cases and coordinate our response. The three of us alone cannot handle every child across this vast Dunford.”
Edward stared at his own palms for a long moment, then nodded.
“Yes. Those arrogant bastards should taste this hell for once. That terrible sensation of life tottering on the tips of their fingers.”
“But… in another way, doesn’t this fill you with pride as a surgeon?”
At that question, Edward’s expression went blank for a moment, then his lips twisted upward and he laughed sharply.
“Of course. Perhaps that’s why one takes up the scalpel—for this terrible thrill.”
* * *
The Rusty Anchor.
In the wake of the diphtheria outbreak, the tavern—which normally had no room to stand—was now only half full.
In that back corner, Dunford’s surgeons had gathered.
“Hmm.”
“Mm….”
While awkward throat-clearings passed between them, every eye was fixed on the squat man seated at the head of the table.
He seemed uncomfortable under their gaze and shifted his brows.
“Speak, Edward.”
Robinson gestured toward Edward.
Though he had yielded the head seat—the position that should have been his—his face showed no disturbance.
Or rather, he was pretending there was none.
“Well then, I’ll begin. I’ve gathered you all here to find a way for us to respond together to the plague now ravaging Dunford.”
The surgeons’ eyes were cold.
To them, Edward remained nothing but an upstart military surgeon—a charlatan who had somehow ridden the tide of fortune and grabbed his share of coin.
In fact, for the past two months, there had been no small amount of grumbling that even with Robinson’s recommendation, someone like this shouldn’t be at the Assembly at all.
“As you all know, Croup disease—or what some call the Angel’s Wing Plague—strikes primarily at children. The throat swells, fever runs high, and if the illness deepens, the throat bloats grotesquely. But to distinguish this disease from others, the critical sign is the gray membrane that clogs the throat….”
Edward fumbled forward with his explanation.
As his words unfolded, the cold glint in every eye turned glacial.
Soon objections began erupting, one after another.
“Croup disease means precisely what the name says—the throat swells and the airway closes. But what’s all this talk of gray membranes? Suffocation from swelling is entirely different from a throat gone white with rot.”
“A throat bloated like a bull’s appears when scarlet fever toxins concentrate in the throat—that’s a symptom of that condition! Yet you attach it to Croup disease as if you’d skimmed through medical texts carelessly. You cannot simply muddle disease names together on a whim.”
Their objections were not without merit.
In this age, “Croup disease” was not a single illness at all—merely a name applied to that final, desperate moment when a patient’s throat closes and he suffocates.
A swollen pharynx, a pale membrane clogging the throat, a grotesquely bloated neck—to the surgeons, each was a distinct symptom born of different toxins, merely sharing one coincidence: they all ended in asphyxia.
Yet Edward was threading these scattered symptoms together on the single strand of a gray membrane and calling it “one disease.”
To the eyes of the established surgeons, this was mere rambling from someone who couldn’t even discern an illness properly.
…….
The difficulty was that Edward lacked the depth of knowledge Allen possessed to refute them all.
Though his thinking had been considerably reformed by living alongside Allen, he remained a man schooled in the old classifications of disease.
Then Robinson, sitting in the corner, cleared his throat with purpose and raised his hand.
“Gentlemen, I wonder if we’re not being rather sharp-edged here. From what I hear, it doesn’t seem entirely without merit.”
The other surgeons turned to Robinson with expressions of disbelief.
“Robinson…?”
“Are you defending this absurd proposition?”
Robinson cleared his throat deliberately, grandly, affecting a theatrical tone.
“That gray membrane might indeed be a sign of death. I’ve seen patients at my clinic recently, and Edward’s account seems to have some truth to it.”
“……?”
“…Do you truly believe this in earnest?”
Robinson nodded slowly.
“I do. My clinical experience bears witness to it.”
It was a lie.
He too could make no sense of what Edward was saying.
But there was one visitor who had come to his home last night whom he could not forget.
‘Robinson.’
The former Royal Court physician.
Yet now a young apprentice to Edward—Allen.
To Robinson, frozen and silent, he had spoken low and coldly.
‘Tomorrow at the assembly, whatever Edward says, you will support him with full force. Do you understand?’
Before that threat, Robinson had no path but obedience.
“Now then, the definition of Croup disease is hardly the heart of today’s assembly anyway. Edward, shall we move on to the treatment? We surgeons prefer to hear practical solutions first, don’t we? Ha.”
With the practiced ease of someone long accustomed to steering meetings, Robinson shifted the subject in a breath.
Edward regarded him silently, then nodded.
“…Very well, Robinson.”
“Nonsense. We’re colleagues facing the same plague together. We ought to listen to one another. Ha.”
The surgeons wondered if Robinson had lost his mind.
It was only months ago that he’d boasted of how the apprentice at Edward’s Clinic was suspicious, how he’d personally finish off that charlatan.
Yet somewhere along the way, he had become a man openly defending Edward.

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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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