Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste -
Chapter 151: Treating Illness and Saving Lives
Chapter 151: Chapter 151: Treating Illness and Saving Lives
Perfikot requested that a whole floor be provided specifically to accommodate the injured and sick brought by her, mainly to effectively disinfect the entire floor and prevent bacterial infection.
Although in this era there are beginning to be clearly defined roles of internists and surgeons, with resident assistant staff and nursing staff starting to manage medicinal materials and medical instruments professionally, and they check on patients’ conditions, providing relatively more advanced treatments, etc...
In Perfikot’s view, however, without the concept of disinfection, the hospitals of this era still felt very primitive to her.
If one had to describe it, the hospitals of this era felt to her like relief institutions equipped with doctors; they had some function, but not much.
Nonetheless, Perfikot also realized that this notion of hers came from arrogance, as she came from a world at least two hundred years more advanced in technology, where the medical system was already very complete and comprehensive. An entire medical care system had already been established, and hospitals treated patients efficiently and accurately, which was incomparable to this era.
Some medical practices that seemed extremely primitive, even frightening and completely ineffective to Perfikot, were seen as mainstream and effective treatment methods in this era, which was intolerable to her.
Especially in the Empire’s home country, where many medical students didn’t attend a single class but only needed to spend 20 gold pounds to buy a medical degree from Langton’s most prestigious research institution. Many graduates had "never dressed a wound, never given an injection, nor seen a childbirth or visited patients in a professional capacity."
Perfikot was at a loss for words regarding these so-called doctors. This was the main reason why she refused treatment from any doctor after her time travel and opted more for self-treatment.
Of course, as a perfect life form, in the three-plus years since she time traveled, Perfikot actually hadn’t contracted any illnesses.
The only time she consulted a doctor was when she was not in good spirits right after her time travel. Foster was concerned about her health and specifically invited a doctor to visit and treat her.
Then she witnessed the era’s three main methods of treatment — bloodletting, enema, and induced vomiting.
Lethargy, surely it’s an imbalance of body fluids, bloodletting will fix it!
Loss of appetite, that’s from eating something bad, induce vomiting to get rid of the filth in the stomach!
As for enemas... that is hardly something a lady should understand.
Bloodletting cannot be said to be completely useless, but obviously, it is not a cure-all. Oftentimes, bloodletting just makes people weaker and can even lead to death by exsanguination.
Induced vomiting, although still a treatment method used in Perfikot’s original world before her time travel, is mainly for conditions like food poisoning and not suitable for all illnesses.
So many patients in this era did not die from the actual disease but were killed by these terrible treatment methods.
But even so, treatment was still an expensive affair, affordable only by the nobility; commoners mostly relied on those itinerant pharmacists for medical treatment.
In the streets of Langton, one often encountered pharmacists recruiting business.
They would gather surrounding citizens and then shout out advertisements for their miraculous medicines like a catchy jingle, sometimes even playing musical instruments.
If there weren’t many believers, they’d entice some onlookers to experience the medicine personally—of course, these were "plants" arranged in advance.
These medicines were often incredibly cheap and claimed to cure all diseases, like "XX pills" for sobering up, "XX ointment" or "XX powder" for treating everything, "polo" for coughs, and painkillers that provide immediate relief upon consumption.
However, in reality, among these whimsically concocted drugs, only a very few actually worked, and these were often what the pharmacists called undisclosed secrets, and even they only knew what effects these medicines had without understanding why they worked.
So even though Perfikot sent the injured and sick at the camp to the hospital, she wasn’t reassured about handing them over to the hospital’s doctors for treatment.
Because if that went wrong, by the time she returned next, everyone might have been treated to death by the doctors.
Immediately upon arrival, she instructed Lieutenant Mikhail to follow her previous orders to lead people in cleaning up the wards on this floor and to collaborate with her maid automaton in arranging all the patients, maintaining the temperature in all wards.
Although New Shaker City is much warmer than the Northern Territory, the temperature was still a bit low, and it seemed there had just been a snowfall recently, with a little over one inch of snow on the ground, so heating was necessary.
After settling the injured and sick, Perfikot went to the hospital’s pharmacy, requested the hospital to provide medicinal materials as per her prescription, and then prepared concoctions to treat these injured and sick individuals.
Though Perfikot was not exactly a professional doctor but merely an Alchemist, she had still gathered some medical knowledge before her time travel, and extracting antibiotics using alchemy was not very difficult for her.
Previously at the Eagle’s Beak Cliff base, she had concocted medicines to treat frostbite using some ancestral knowledge from the Brandelis family, as march and battle inevitably encountered such issues, knowing how to handle them was necessary.
As for colds and typhoid, though there weren’t any effective treatments, some of the Brandelis family’s ancestral notes contained relevant response methods.
These practices couldn’t be said to be highly accurate, but at least they had been tested over generations in the military by the Brandelis Family. Combined with some of Perfikot’s own knowledge, the concoctions she prepared were certainly more effective than the concoctions used by the era’s pharmacists.
To say the least, she found some absurdly inappropriate content like aconite added to the medicines for treating colds in this hospital.
Moreover, the batch of injured and sick she sent to the hospital mostly suffered from various ailments caused by low temperatures. With sufficient warmth, some auxiliary treatment could bring them to recovery.
This is also why Perfikot did not send the injured and sick to New Shaker City in the first place.
Unfortunately, among the injured sent this time, some were in too severe a condition. Even though Perfikot eventually allowed the hospital doctors to participate in the treatment, a few injured with typhoid succumbed due to their dire conditions.
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