“Horse dung?” Liscia repeated.
“When a horse is on the move, you generally just leave its droppings behind, right? Well, that dung dries out, gets picked up by the wind, and it harms the lungs of those who inhale it. The more unsanitary a place was to begin with, the more likely horse dung is to be left alone. If we limit the horses to the main roads, it makes collecting their droppings easy. This ought to bring down the number of people contracting pneumonia considerably.”
“Huh?! That’s all it takes?!” Liscia exclaimed.
“…Yeah,” I said. “‘That’s all’ it would have taken to save lives.”
“Urkh…”
It may have been a harsh way to say it, but I couldn’t have her writing off something that would mean the difference between life and death for people with a “that’s all it takes.”
“Well, in some ways, I can’t blame you,” I said. “The concept of hygiene doesn’t exist yet in this country. In fact, only two of the medical professionals I’ve met with understood it.”
I think I’ve mentioned before that because this country had magic, its technology was sort of all over the place. Well, that was true in the field of medicine, as well.
As you might expect from a fantasy world, this place had what was called recovery magic. By converting magic into certain wavelengths within the body, it heightened the body’s natural healing ability. It was effective in treating external injuries, such as scratches, cuts, and bruises. Really impressive practitioners could even reattach an arm that had just been severed.
If this was all someone saw of it, it would seem like a miracle.
On the other hand, recovery magic couldn’t treat viruses and infections that the body’s natural ability to recover couldn’t. All people had to lessen the symptoms of those were medicine men and women who could brew herbal remedies. Furthermore, for the elderly, whose natural healing ability had declined, it wasn’t effective in treating external injuries, either.
Once you know how something works, it might be easy to think, “Oh, that’s simple,” but most people in this country didn’t even know about microbes, let alone viruses. When people try to find answers to questions they don’t have the necessary knowledge to answer, they’re prone to finding answers that fall within what’s common sense to them.
“Healing magic doesn’t work” would equate to “Even miracles can’t cure it,” and then turn into “It’s a devil’s curse.”
People put together these sorts of formulas in their heads, then end up using bizarre occult goods in their attempts to treat the illness.
“If you buy this pot, you’ll never get sick” actually worked as a sales pitch in this world, so it was nothing to laugh at. If you’re going to buy something like that, you might as well wrap a leek around your neck before you go to sleep instead.
However, there were buds of hope. The two doctors I just mentioned. If I could have those two lead a reformation of medical practice in this country…
“Hey, Souma, what are you mumbling to yourself for?” Liscia’s voice snapped me back to reality.
“Sorry,” I said. “I got to thinking for a moment there.”
“Geez… Okay, so what did you mean when you said you nationalized garbage disposal?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” I said. “Liscia, do you know how trash is generally disposed of in this country?”
“Garbage is sorted into ‘burnable’ and ‘non-burnable,’ then burned or buried accordingly, right?”
“Wow, you were able to answer that pretty easily,” I said.
“Did you think I was ignorant of the peoples’ lives just because I’m royalty? Don’t insult me. I lived in the dorms when I went to military academy, I’ll have you know,” she said indignantly.
I see. So she’s not as ignorant of the world as I thought…
“But you’re still wrong.”
“Huh?” she asked.
“I said ‘generally,’ didn’t I? Your answer is still only representative of upper class thinking. It’s a world away from the common way of thinking.”
“W-Well, what is the common way of thinking about it, then?” she asked.
“Aisha, how do your people dispose of garbage in the God-Protected Forest?” I queried.
“Hm? Garbage?” Aisha’s eyes went a little wide when I suddenly turned the conversation to her, but she was able to come up with an answer right away. “Let me think… We burn it.”
“Is that all?” I asked.
“That is all.”
“That can’t be right! What do you do about the things that won’t burn?!” Liscia objected, but Aisha just stared blankly back at her.
“Would you even throw out things that aren’t burnable to begin with?” Aisha asked.
“Of course you would! What else would you do with broken tools?” Liscia demanded.
“We fix them and keep using them.”
“…Huh?”
“We use kitchen waste as fertilizer. With pottery that is too broken to repair, we break it into fine pieces and scatter it over the ground. If metal tools break, we fix them so they can be used again. If they can’t be fixed, we sell them to a used metal dealer.” (A type of merchant who collects scrap metal.) “The only things we throw out are splintered wood and damaged leather armor, but… we burn those in our campfires.”
This time, it was Liscia’s turn for wide-eyed surprise. I couldn’t help but laugh a little at their exchange.
“Ha ha! Aisha’s got it right this time.”
“Soumaaaa…” Liscia moaned.
“Don’t let it get you down so much,” I said. “For the upper classes who have to keep up appearances, and for the military whose equipment can mean the difference between life and death, it’s probably best for them if the things they have are practically brand new. However, for ordinary households, that isn’t the case. Now, Aisha’s example takes it to an extreme, but people in the capital handle things in a similar fashion. The main difference would be that they burn their kitchen waste, too, I guess? Also, for oversized trash, like wooden furniture, they customarily gather it all in the main plaza once a year for burning, don’t they? So they’re the same in that they only have burnable trash.”
In this world, there was nothing like plastic or styrofoam that needed special treatment before it could be reused. Most tools were made of iron, stone, soil (which includes glass and ceramic) or wood. They could reuse iron by melting it down, and if they just left stone lying around, it would blend in with the natural scenery around it. The one exception was artificial substances that were created by mages using magic (magic substances), but these were valuable in and of themselves, so they were almost never thrown away.
As for things made of metal, they could be expensive, too, so the common people did everything within their power to repair them. Beating iron back into shape was easy, after all. When there was really nothing they could do, and it seemed cheaper to just buy a new one, they would sell it to a used metal dealer for small change. Used metal dealers collected this metal and melted it down, recasting it into other metal products.
However, this was being done by individuals, so they didn’t have good facilities for it, or the ability to devote a large amount of time, so they could only produce low-quality metal as a result. All they did was melt it down and then let it harden, so impurities got mixed in in the process. As a result, low-quality metal ended up circulating in the country.
This country was resource-poor. If low-quality metal was all that could be obtained locally, people would be forced to import high-quality metal from other countries. I wanted to limit that spending as much as possible. However, if I tried to tell the used metal dealers, who were acting as individuals, to reuse the metal in high-quality impurity-free metal, it wasn’t going to happen.