Hua Tuo Becomes a Surgeon

Chapter 1

Where am I? Who am I?

“It’s all so futile.”

Looking at the moon in the sky through a window the size of a palm, Hwabu’s eyes were filled with deep remorse.

“I saved countless lives… but I couldn’t save my own!”

To think that after spending his entire life as a doctor and devoting himself to good deeds, this was how he ended up—dying in prison.

The reason why he was imprisoned was because he had told Cao Cao [1], who was suffering from a severe headache, that he needed to open his skull to treat him.

When Cao Cao heard that his skull had to be opened, he immediately assumed that he was an assassin sent to kill him, so he had him thrown in prison and tortured.

His hundred-year-old body had rapidly deteriorated under the torture, and he was now dying because of the lack of proper food.

As a doctor who had seen many patients on the brink of death, he could clearly sense that his own life was coming to an end.

“Foolish Cao Cao.”

He muttered, looking at the moon through the window.

“Even though I’ll die unjustly at your hands, seeing your son, Chong [2], it was clear that he is suffering from a disease that causes his intestines to rot and twist. No other doctor can cure that disease but me, and one day you will watch your son die coughing up blood, and you will regret this for the rest of your life.”

By the time Hwabu’s curse – well, more of a prediction than a curse – ended, the moon was covered by clouds, and the prison was plunged into thick darkness.

As the sky was also shrouded in darkness, he closed his eyes, no longer looking outside the window.

‘If I fall asleep like this, I’ll never wake up!’

Even as he was dying, the one comfort to his heart was that he had been able to complete the medical books he had been steadily writing while he was imprisoned.

Since he had given the completed medical books to the prison guards, even if he died like this, the doctors who learned medicine from his books would take care of patients in the world.

***

Waking up with a terrible headache, he gritted his teeth and frowned.

‘Am I not dead yet?’

He thought that when he closed his eyes, he would never open them again…

Having the medical skills worthy of being called a divine doctor, he knew his physical condition better than anyone else.

‘I shouldn’t have opened my eyes. What a tenacious life I have!’

There are cases where a patient who is about to die may last for another day or two.

It seemed that he was in such a situation.

Throb, throb…

What would he do when he opened his eyes again?

After all, he was trapped and was just waiting to die. He thought it would be better to lie down and wait for his life to end without opening his eyes, but the throbbing pain in his head became increasingly unbearable.

Hwabu frowned and raised his hands to rub his temples.

If he was going to die, he wanted it to be with a little less pain.

‘Now that I’m about to die, I remember the medical books I saw when I was studying in Xuzhou! If I hadn’t read those books at that time, I wouldn’t have lived as a doctor all my life.’

The initial shock he felt when he first encountered the medical writings of the Saekmokin [3] still couldn’t be forgotten even now when he was about to die.

The techniques of cutting open a person’s stomach, stitching up a ruptured intestine, tying off blood vessels to stop bleeding, and splitting open the skull to remove tumors.

In the early days of his medical practice, more people were killed than saved, but as he accumulated experience and research, he was able to develop Mafeitang [4], and from then on, more people were saved than killed, and he was even undeservedly called divine by people.

Hwabu opened the book in his memory as if to relive his past.

Rustle.

‘Huh?’

The moment he opened the book, his eyes widened involuntarily.

‘I-isn’t this the book I saw in Xuzhou?’

Drawings resembling dissections of various parts of the human body. And next to them were arrows and unfamiliar characters.

What kind of painter could draw so vividly, as if he had put a person on paper? And what are these characters that I’ve never seen before?

The lines were impossible to be drawn with a brush dipped in ink, and no amount of pigment could produce such realistic colors.

What was even more incomprehensible was that, although they were clearly unfamiliar characters he had never seen before, somehow, not only he could read them, but he could also understand their meaning.

Hwabu hurriedly examined the cover of the medical book.

The first thing he saw was the precise drawing of a human heart, and at the top, there were unfamiliar characters that read “Essential Human Anatomy”.

‘E-essential Human Anatomy? Is it a medical book that studies the human body by dissecting it by part?’

He could clearly remember the first time he saw the medical books of the Saekmokin in Xuzhou, but this was definitely not the same book.

‘I don’t remember seeing this kind of medical book… Why is this in my memory?’

In the midst of questioning, as he tilted his head, he realized that this memory was not his own but belonged to someone else.

‘Lee Min… ho? This is the memory of a member [5] named Lee Minho… No, it’s a doctor’s [6] memory. But why do I have Dr. Lee Minho’s memory?’

As he concentrated more, he could discern that the owner of this memory was currently the owner of this body.

“Huk!”

In an instant, Hwabu opened his eyes, gasping for air.

What on earth is going on?

He hurriedly examined his body and saw that it wasn’t the body of his old self who was dying from the aftermath of torture, but the body of a young man.

The clothes he was wearing were unfamiliar to him, and also the bed he was lying on and everything else in the five-square meter room were all unfamiliar.

He immediately saw a computer, TV, desk, bookshelf, refrigerator, washing machine, air conditioner, and other unfamiliar objects. Despite their unfamiliar appearance, upon seeing them, he instantly understood what they were used for and how to use them.

“Wh-what is going on? Am I… am I possessing a doctor’s body from another world?”

He had witnessed fortune tellers, shamans, and exorcists perform rituals to summon the spirits of the dead or divination to ward off bad luck and predict the future.

Was something like that happening to me now?

“Who summoned me into this young man’s body?”

Hwabu shouted into the empty air in frustration.

“……”

But even after a while, the surroundings remained dead silent.

“If you called me from my spiritual rest, you must have a reason. Why not reveal it immediately?”

“……”

“If you keep silent, I will return to my slumber.”

When there was still no response or change even after some time, Hwabu lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

However, even after doing so, nothing happened.

“You must have thought that I was talking nonsense, I’ll really go back to my slumber, so don’t regret it.”

He closed his eyes and waited for a long time.

In fact, he had said he would return to his slumber, but he didn’t know how to do it.

As he lay with his eyes closed, the headache gradually disappeared, and his mind began to clear.

‘If I keep lying like this, will I eventually go back to the afterlife?’

While quietly lying there with his eyes closed, he couldn’t help but be curious about the strange world this body lived in. However, he couldn’t just go along with the intentions of the shaman who brought him here without permission.

He continued to lie there, but he still couldn’t go back to slumber, and the medical book he had glimpsed earlier continued to come to mind.

‘Ah! Come to think of it, the medical book I’m thinking of now seemed to be on the bookshelf over there…’

After lying down for about ten minutes, he finally couldn’t resist his curiosity and stood up, he found the book he had seen earlier and opened it.

Rustle.

The moment he opened the book and saw the contents inside, his eyes widened.

“Hoo! There really is such a medical book in the world! How can someone draw with such precision?”

After flipping through a few pages, he saw drawings of bones, blood vessels, and organs of the human body. And as he looked at them, he realized that it was not a drawing done by hand but printed with the excellent technology of this era.

Shuaaaa……

Suddenly, the knowledge of this world…… no, the memories of the body’s owner, Lee Minho, began flooding in like a torrent. The headache that had subsided returned, and Hwabu staggered and sat down on a chair.

‘What, what is this? This is nonsense! Even if the world is different, there are giant carriages flying in the sky…… No, aircraft, and there are things called cellphones that allow you to talk to someone as if you were talking right next to each other, no matter how far away you are!’

But that wasn’t all.

Computers, cars, satellites, even a spacecraft that had traveled to and from the moon, and more. A world built on incredible scientific civilization unfolded before him.

Extreme confusion naturally followed.

Is this the world where the doctor Lee Minho lived?

How could such a world exist?

It was so different from the world he lived in, where survival depended on bloodshed and war.

As he recalled the world he lived in, another stream of knowledge flooded in.

The current world where Lee Minho lives and the past world where he lived.

“Huk! Th-this can’t be!”

Unbelievably, the two worlds were not different worlds.

Absurd as it seemed, he learned that the world was not flat but round, and was called Earth and that it revolved around the sun.

After the era of war, the rise and fall of numerous dynasties, the development of scientific civilization made the unimaginable possible. In the past thousands of years, the world had undergone such tremendous changes.

‘S-so much time has passed since I died.’

It felt like he had just taken a nap and woken up.

Surprisingly, there were records of himself as a doctor named Hua Tuo in Lee Minho’s memory.

He was the first surgeon in China to invent anesthesia. The ill-fated doctor who treated Guan Yu’s arm and was later killed by Cao Cao.

It was only a short piece of knowledge, but it was astonishing that even after thousands of years, someone walking the path of medicine still knew his name.

And it made him inexplicably happy.

The fact that he had left a name in history that would be remembered by future generations proved that he hadn’t wasted his life as a doctor.

For a while, he took in the vast knowledge, or rather, the immense knowledge of Lee Minho.

Although he was nothing more than a departed soul and would return to the state of slumber once the possession period ended, it was still incredibly amazing to have glimpsed a little bit about this surprising future.

‘By the way, the fact that I, a soul, possessed this young man Lee Minho means that he died, but why did he die at such a young age?’

Digging through Lee Minho’s memories at the end of the vast amount of knowledge that kept streaming in, he was able to find out how Lee Minho died.

“Table death [7]? Attending physician? Resident? Intern? Shifting the blame? Excessive on-call duty due to that? Eventually leading to death from overwork? Huh! Ridiculous. Dying from overwork in a world like this!”

His eyes widened in utter disbelief.

The owner of this body, Lee Minho, was an intern in cardiothoracic surgery.

While on night duty, he was ordered to transfer a patient who had been brought to the emergency room to the operating room. However, when the attending physician entered the operating room after putting on his surgical gown and sanitizing their hands, the patient was already dead.

The residents and interns attempted to revive the stopped heart with CPR and a defibrillator, but the soul that had already left did not return.

The patient’s family members and guardians, who arrived late at the hospital, wept upon seeing the dead patient and sought accountability from the doctors and the hospital.

The next day, a medical lawsuit was filed.

The cardiothoracic attending physician, not wanting to be entangled in a lawsuit, claimed that the patient had already been dead when he was transferred to the operating room, but the emergency department claimed that they had sent the patient to the operating room alive.

In the end, the responsibility was placed on the intern who had transferred the patient from the emergency room to the operating room.

Interns at university hospitals are not even considered as doctors, so what responsibility can they be held accountable for?

Fortunately, the patient’s family, who had been extremely agitated, eventually accepted the death of the deceased as inevitable and dropped the charges.

Although the charges were dropped, Lee Minho, who had transferred the patient, was subjected to a great deal of torment by the attending physicians and residents, and was forced to stand night duty posts in the intensive care unit until the lawsuit was dropped.

Lee Minho experienced extreme stress.

And even after the lawsuit was dropped, he received no apology or compensation. After finishing his shift, he bought ten bottles of soju on his way home and drank them like water.

Then he lost consciousness, and that was all he could remember.

That’s how absurdly he met his end.

“Hmph! To die in such a senseless way at the age of just twenty-seven!”

~~~

Footnotes:

First, lemme discuss the historical background of our MC, Hua Tuo.

Hua Tuo was a renowned Chinese doctor/physician who lived during the Eastern Han Dynasty. He is considered one of the most accomplished and innovative medical practitioners in ancient China, pioneering various surgical techniques. Also, he is especially known for the herbal concoction he developed, the Mafeitang (mafeisan).

He did die because of Cao Cao. So, the surgical treatment (opening the skull) he proposed for Cao Cao’s headaches was met with suspicion, and he was executed.

[1] Cao Cao – one of the powerful figures during the Three Kingdoms period. He is known for his military campaigns and political acumen, but he is also a controversial figure, as he is often portrayed both positively and negatively in historical and literary sources.

[2] Chong – the second son of Cao Cao named Cao Chong. He is historically known for his intelligence and talents and is considered to be a child prodigy during the Three Kingdoms period. He was known for his skills in mathematics and astronomy. For example, he measured an elephant’s weight by using a volume displacement method. Basically, the elephant was placed in a container filled with water, and the amount of water displaced equates to the elephant’s weight. Unfortunately, he died at a young age, around 13 or 14, possibly due to illness.

[3] Saekmokin – refers to the social status within the Yuan Dynasty, which was established by the Mongols. The term is used to collectively describe individuals from Western regions, such as Uighurs, Tanguts, and Persians.

[4] Mafeitang (麻肺湯) – it’s known as Mafeisan in English. It basically means numbing concoction and was developed by Hua Tuo.

[5] uiwon (의원) – based on my understanding, it means a member of a clinic or hospital. But putting this all is too much, so I opted for ‘member’.

[6] uisa (의사) – doctor/physician

[7] Table death – a medical term that refers to an emergency patient dying during surgery, or dying on the operational table.