Up until now, I’d had him working with Hilde to guide this country’s system of medicine forward.
His corpse collecting and dissections had offended a lot of people, so he was seen as a total heretic in the medical world. The hardest part of hiring him had been getting rid of that prejudice against him. The way he acted, I couldn’t count on him to defend himself, after all.
Having no other choice, I’d had him examine an important executive who was well connected in this country and was suffering from illness. By having him treat a sickness that was believed to be untreatable, I had made that executive recognize his skills.
Once people know something is effective, their views change quickly. The number of medical practitioners seeking to learn surgery had begun to increase, too. That being the case, by putting the important executive he had helped to make a full recovery in charge, we were now training new surgeons in this country.
As for me, I was currently rushing to rework the laws and issue surgical licenses so that fake surgeons who lacked the necessary skills wouldn’t appear. At first, I would only require licenses for surgery. Eventually, I intended to make treatment with light magic and everything related to pharmacology require licenses, too.
Anyway, let’s get back to the story.
When she heard about the emergency case, Hilde’s expression turned serious as if someone had flipped a switch. “Tell me about the patient.”
She totally had the face of a doctor now. That was a professional for you.
Brad explained the situation to Hilde plainly. “It’s a pregnant woman from this village. Her water has already broken. The baby could be born at any moment, but the position of the fetus is bad. It’s lying with its back against the exit to the mother’s womb.”
“Transverse lie, huh… That’s unusual and dangerous…”
I didn’t understand what they were saying, but I gathered it was going to be a difficult birth.
“The midwife has already given up, it seems,” said Brad.
“Well, no surprise there,” said Hilde. “It will get caught on the pelvic bone. Normally, the mother or the child… one of them would have to be sacrificed here. In order to save both…”
“Yeah… A surgical incision is probably the only option.”
Surgical incision… Oh, a Cesarean section! But Hilde was looking at him dubiously.
“Can you do that? I’ve heard that the survival rate for mothers who have their womb opened is less than twenty percent, you know?”
“There’s one very clear reason why that survival rate is so low.”
“Oh… And what would that be?”
“Neither you nor I performed the procedure,” Brad said, as if it were obvious.
When he spoke with such confidence, it made Hilde furrow her brow. “You say the most incredible things as if they were nothing…”
“It’s a matter of fact,” he said. “To be more precise, it’s because they lack my skills and the three-eyed’s knowledge of infectious disease. Their process is only cut open the belly, take out the fetus, close up the wound, then heal it with light magic. They don’t have anesthetic, so the pregnant mother suffers. Their incision and suturing technique is underdeveloped, so even if they use light magic, the wound doesn’t close up properly and the patient dies of blood loss. They don’t have three-eyed antibiotics, so it’s easy for the patient to develop an infectious disease after the procedure. That’s why the survival rate is low.”
Brad extended a hand to Hilde.
“Even by myself, I can bring the rate of success up to eighty percent. However, if you’re at my side doing hygiene management, we can bring that incredibly close to one hundred percent.”
“Geez, that doesn’t leave me with much choice, does it?” Hilde scratched the back of her head before taking Brad’s hand. “Before a doctor, all patients are equal. That’s why doctors don’t get to be picky about who they treat.”
“Thank you. Having you there is as good as having a hundred of anyone else.”
Hilde turned to face the rest of us. “Your Majesty! Refugee boss! It’s just like you heard. Sorry, but we’ll be wanting to borrow your underlings for this.”
“Sure, of course you can,” I said.
“Of course,” said Jirukoma. “We are a family. It’s a chief’s duty to defend the family.”
“Thanks,” said Hilde. “Dragonewt girl!”
“M-Me?!” Carla jumped a little when she was called.
“Go to the medical laboratory in the capital, as quickly as you can. Bring back equipment and medical supplies for us. If you ask for my black bag, the researchers there will know what you mean. You can just bring the whole bag.”
“I–I understand!” Carla hurried out of the tent.
Next, Hilde looked to Jirukoma. “Refugee boss, I want to borrow this tent. It’s best to move her to the most hygienic place we can manage.”
“I don’t mind,” said Jirukoma. “Use whatever you want.”
“Also, we’ll be searching for someone with the same blood as the mother, so gather the refugees around.”
“Understood.”
I learned this later, but this world also had A, B, and O (though their naming scheme was different) blood types. Mysteriously, even across races, if the blood types matched, they could almost always be used for blood transfusions. I said “almost always” because there were some blood types that couldn’t accept transfusions regardless of the blood type used. Maybe that could be because there was Rh positive and negative blood types in this world, too.
“Next, you know something about hygiene, right, sire?” asked Hilde. “Explain it to the boss here and his people. I want the environment we work in to be as good as possible. Also, boil a lot of water for us. We’ll want to disinfect our tools.”
“Got it! Liscia, Owen, let’s do this!”
“Okay!” said Liscia.
“Understood!” agreed Owen.
“L–Let me help, too!” Komain broke in.
Komain followed us around, setting up things inside the tent and helping boil a lot of water. With no regard for our respective positions, each of us worked hard to do what we could.
Those who could do something did it.
In a way, I felt like we were embodying the current state of this country.
Once the preparations were finished, there was nothing left for us to do.
Inside the tent, Brad and Hilde must have been performing the procedure now. I could hear the mother’s ragged breathing from inside. All we could do was wait outside the tent for the procedure to finish.
Liscia, who was watching the door, spoke in a voice filled with concern. “I heard they’re splitting open the mother’s belly. Is she going to be okay?”
“If that’s all you heard, it does sounds like a bizarre crime of some kind, doesn’t it?” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
I put a hand on top of Liscia’s head.
“Cesarean sections are a method that is commonly used for difficult births in the world I came from, and the rate of women dying in childbirth is pretty low. The vast majority of people there don’t even think about the fact that a pregnant woman might die when she gives birth. They just assume the child will be born fine.”
“The world you came from is as amazing as ever, Souma.”
“Yeah, kinda,” I said. “Also… those two can do something similar to my country’s medicine. Well, my world lacks light magic, so it’s not easy to do a straight comparison.” I turned to Jirukoma, who was standing beside me. “What about the mother’s husband?”
“We don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” he said. “It seems they were separated while escaping from the north, you see. Still, she said she was determined to give birth to the child in her womb and they would wait for the father together.”