The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 6

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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 6
Edward’s mind raced with sudden clarity.
If this man truly was an internist, and if he shared that knowledge with him…
This was the kind of rare opportunity that might come once in a lifetime, if at all.
To miss it would be to regret it forever.
“Y-yes! I agree!”
Edward blurted out urgently.
Allen, half-risen from his seat, tilted his head in confusion.
“Agree to what, sir?”
“I’ll take you on as my apprentice!”
Allen broke into a broad smile and settled back into his chair.
“Then we’ll need to draw up a contract.”
“I don’t have one prepared at the moment.”
“I came prepared.”
Allen withdrew a rolled sheet of paper from his coat and laid it on the table.

“I purchased it from a legal instruments shop. We can modify the details to suit our circumstances.”
Edward let out a low whistle.
This man was serious.
‘I’m being completely swept along,’ Edward thought ruefully.
Edward chided himself.
Normally, an apprenticeship contract was supposed to be a solemn affair—the prospective student’s parents arriving, humbly offering substantial fees, the master maintaining proper authority throughout.
But this was entirely reversed.
A master forced into a contract by his student—what an absurdity.
“Article One: Duties of obedience. The apprentice shall maintain the master’s confidentiality and willingly comply with all lawful instructions…. Yes, this is acceptable. However, the standard seven-year contract term seems excessive. Given the special circumstances, let’s set it initially for one year with annual renewal. As for the detailed provisions….”
Allen, possessed of considerable legal knowledge, proceeded to revise the clauses with fluid efficiency.
Edward could only stand by in a daze, swept along in the current.
“Article Two: Behavioral restrictions applicable to the apprentice. Why are there so many? Marriage and adultery prohibited, gambling, entertainment, hunting, unauthorized departure forbidden…. I’m twenty-eight years old. Let me remove the unrealistic clauses and make some revisions.”
……
“Article Three: Duties of the master. The master pledges to instruct the apprentice in Surgical Technique and Pharmaceutical Art to the best of his ability. Nothing to revise here.”
“Wait—isn’t this skewed entirely in the apprentice’s favor?”
“Article Four: Tuition.”
Allen’s finger came to rest on the final item of the contract.
Allen’s finger marked the section on the document.
“How much will you require, sir?”
……
Edward’s thoughts spun rapidly.
How much? A great deal!
This clinic itself sat atop a mountain of debt, and with patients drying up, he could barely scrape together the monthly rent.
His military pension alone was nowhere near sufficient.
This was his chance to name a sum that would plug every hole and leave him secure besides.
“None at all.”
The moment the words left his lips, Edward wanted to bite them off.
What madness possessed him?
Learn when to bluff and when not to!
“By your own logic, if I teach you Surgical Technique in exchange for you teaching me medical knowledge, it would be wrong of me to charge tuition on top of that.”
Even as smooth words poured forth, his insides burned with regret.
‘Please,’ he thought desperately, ‘ask me once more.’
But Allen merely regarded him with a look of mild surprise, then nodded matter-of-factly.
“Understood. Then I’ll list the tuition as zero.”
Edward squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, Allen’s signature was already inscribed neatly at the bottom of the contract.
Allen held out the quill to him.
“Sign now, if you would, Master Edward.”
Edward exhaled deeply and scrawled his name across the page.
Now the document would be filed with the authorities, where it would claim a place in the musty apprenticeship records kept in some moldy archive.
“From this moment on, I shall address you as Master, and apply myself to my studies with all sincerity.”
At Allen’s words, Edward stared at him intently.
A perfectly ordinary-looking man, yet everything he did defied all reason.
‘I’m… a master now.’
It was a development he’d never imagined, but Edward made a show of composing himself with dignity.
Whether his new student was a charlatan or not, one thing was certain: he was now a master.
“I’m delighted to take on an apprentice. Shall we shake hands?”
Edward extended his hand, and Allen grasped it readily.
Surprisingly, Edward’s grip was remarkably firm, his palm rough with the calluses of a working surgeon.
As they shook, Allen found himself seized by an odd conviction. Perhaps he had come to the right place after all.
* * *
Thus began the master-and-apprentice relationship between the short, stocky surgeon Edward and the tall, handsome physician Allen.
The two sat side by side, waiting for patients.
One hour. Two hours. Three hours.
……
Edward’s brow furrowed by degrees.
Allen, turning the pages of a book with studied indifference, spoke up.
“Is today perhaps a day the clinic is closed?”
“…No.”
“Well, I suppose in a small city people simply don’t get injured as often. It’s quite different from what I’m accustomed to.”
The remark was made without malice, yet it gouged a sharp wound across Edward’s pride.
He shot to his feet.
“Damn it! Do you think I sit idle by choice? I’m going mad wondering why no patients are coming! If you’re to be my apprentice, you should suffer alongside your master, not mock me!”
“I apologize. That wasn’t my intention.”
The ready contrition left Edward feeling embarrassed instead.
Allen pressed on at once.
“So then—have you formed any theory as to why?”
“…There are strange rumors circulating.”
“What sort of rumors?”
“That my knowledge of internal medicine is worthless, and so on!”
Edward clenched his fists.
Then he glanced sideways at Allen, as if gauging his reaction.
“…But tell me, do you know my background?”
“Yes. I understand you were a military physician.”
“Though it shames me to say it aloud, among surgeons there is a certain… contempt for those who served as military physicians, particularly regimental physicians.”
Having said this, he quickly added, as if in self-defense:
“Of course I’m an excellent surgeon! I’ve amputated hundreds of limbs in the service—I daresay not a single surgeon in Danford has performed the Amputation Technique as often as I have!”
Allen was slowly coming to realize that Edward’s speech grew rapid when he was agitated.
“But as you well know, in a city like this, surgical skill alone won’t sustain a practice. One must have some knowledge of internal medicine to draw patients.”
It echoed what Pare had said.
The “flaw in the master” was nothing exotic—it was simply a matter of understanding internal medicine, of knowing how to read patients.
“Yet from the moment I opened my practice, rumors began spreading through the streets. That I’m a quack with poor grasp of internal medicine. That I’m on the level of a barber-surgeon in the gutter! Even other surgeons now refuse to associate with me…”
Edward’s face flushed red.
Allen closed his book with apparent interest and fixed his gaze on Edward.
“What is your own assessment?”
“Eh? My assessment?”
“Yes. Do you truly believe your knowledge of internal medicine is lacking?”
Edward bit his lip.
Then, with something like a sigh, he spoke:
“…It is lacking, that much is true. I know almost nothing of Vitalism, Humoral Theory, these grand theoretical frameworks. As for the organs of the abdomen and thorax, I have little beyond basic anatomical knowledge…”
As he spoke, he found himself confessing, and his head sank low.
“Blast it all. I’m practically admitting why patients don’t come.”
“Don’t distress yourself.”
Allen spoke gently.
“The so-called internal medical knowledge that other surgeons possess is largely meaningless. If anything, a man who has read one book and grasps things half-formed is far more dangerous.”
“…Aren’t you setting great store by your background as a physician?”
Edward too was a surgeon.
Allen’s words amounted to a veiled criticism of all surgeons.
Yet Allen shook his head.
“No. Physicians are just as bad. It’s all hollow nonsense. It won’t actually help anyone.”
“…What sort of absurdity is that?”
Bang! Bang!
At that moment, the clinic door shook with urgent knocking.
Life flooded back into Edward’s face in an instant.
‘Finally, a patient!’
In truth, it was his first patient all day. He hastily fastened his collar and turned to Allen.
“Now, physician—no, apprentice, rather. Pay close attention to how I conduct an examination.”
Allen smiled and spread his hand in silent assent.
“The door is open! Come in!”
Edward called out loudly.
With a creak, the entrance door swung wide, and heavy footfalls echoed down the corridor into the consulting room.
But the moment Edward saw the face of the man who entered, his instincts screamed at him.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
“You charlatan!”
The patient roared.
A middle-aged man with a shabby bandage wrapped around his left arm. He strode forward and seized Edward by the collar.
“You bastard! I should never have come to you for treatment!”
Edward’s head snapped back and forth as the man shook him.
Edward recognized him at once—a burn patient he’d treated four days prior.
And it was abundantly clear the man was furious.

Edward was panic-stricken.
Cold sweat ran down his spine, though he struggled to keep his composure.
“N-no, I… what do you mean?”
He barely managed to wring out the words.
The patient released his grip and glared at Edward with barely suppressed rage.
“Look. Look at what your treatment did to my arm!”
The man roughly unwound his bandage.
Grotesque burn scars came into view.
Nearly a third of his left upper arm had been stripped raw, a livid crimson, with yellowish pus weeping from the tissue.
Blisters dotted the wound in clusters.
Gulp.
Edward swallowed hard.
He couldn’t believe it.
This patient, of all people, was the one he had treated with painstaking care, drawing on his ‘medical knowledge’ for the first time.
‘Damn it. I even looked up the books for this one….’
During his time as a military physician, he’d seen burns often enough to sicken him.
Usually linseed oil or olive oil were applied, yet infection invariably set in.
Infection was the norm.
So this time, he’d even consulted medical texts to treat it.
A book called ‘Humors and Pathological Mechanisms.’
One philosophical passage had captivated him entirely.
‘Angry heat can only be subdued by Cold Energy.’
Reading those words, he had felt a flash of insight.
A philosophical approach, not mere oil slathered on and left to chance. So what remedy possessed that cold property?
‘Lead embodies the coldest of natures.’
The answer was already there.
He’d prescribed Lead Ointment at considerable expense.
Yet the result had been so poor it might have been better to use oil instead.
“Before I came here, I met another physician on the street. He told me that heat must be treated with heat! Do you know what he said to me? That cold properties must be used?”
Edward stood with his mouth agape.
The patient jabbed a finger and continued.
“He said to use hot medicines and heat iron, bringing it close to the burn! He said that cold treatment only traps moisture and worsens the condition!”
“I… I…”
“What will you say, you fraud! My arm is ruined because of you!”
Edward wanted to weep.
The worst of it was having to endure this humiliation in front of the young man he’d just accepted as his apprentice.
“Pardon me.”
Allen spoke up then.
The patient’s eyes narrowed as he looked at him.
“Who are you?”
“I am Edward’s apprentice.”
The man glanced back and forth between Edward and Allen.
It was plain he was thinking: ‘How could this fraud possibly have an apprentice?’
Then, as though the man weren’t worth his time, Edward turned his gaze back to him and jabbed an accusing finger repeatedly.
“You think I’ll let this go? I’m calling my friends here right now. I’ll make your life a living hell until you pay for what you did to my arm!”
“I can save your arm.”
At Allen’s words, both Edward and the patient turned to stare at him simultaneously.
“What?”
“What did you say?”

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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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