The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 15 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Smallpox and Chickenpox

The day after the test, Maomao was taking stock of their inventory as usual.

Why would they handpick people to do drug trials? she wondered.

It was her fault for pondering while she worked.

"Yikes!"

She was so distracted by her ruminations that she almost knocked over a jar full of medicine. She was saved by Yo, who had come to help her and luckily was standing nearby. She propped the jar up and prevented catastrophe.

"Phew ... Sorry about that. Thanks for the help," Maomao said.

"Was something on your mind?" Yo asked.

Yo was the taller of the two palace ladies who had recently joined the service. She was assigned to a different place from Maomao, but frequently came to her to learn how to mix or preserve herbs and medicines. She was a quick study, and Maomao enjoyed having a student who rose to her teaching.

"Oh, nothing much," she said now, trying to energize herself with a slap on the cheeks.

Still, she couldn't quite get the thought out of her head. Just then, she happened to catch sight of Yo's long sleeves. "I realize this isn't very polite, but may I make a request of you?" she said.

"Yes? What?"

"Would you show me your smallpox scars?"

Yo's arm was covered with small welts from smallpox. An outbreak of the disease had destroyed her village.

Yo looked dubious for a moment, but then she rolled up her sleeves. Her arms were covered in small scars like tiny red beans.

"Are they that unusual?" she asked.

"No, but I've never had the chance to examine smallpox scars up close," said Maomao. Some of the customers at the apothecary shop had had them, but no one had been eager to show them off. Maomao knew very well that it was not a nice thing to ask for.

"Are the scars only on your arms?" she asked.

"No, I have some on my shoulders and neck as well. But a lot less than some other people."

"You think that's thanks to Kokuyou's treatment?"

"Yes," Yo said simply.

Kokuyou had highly visible smallpox scars on his face, but he was surprisingly cheerful in spite of it. He had been a doctor in Yo's village, and although he acted awfully frivolous, Yo trusted him implicitly.

"This treatment-what exactly did he do to you?" Maomao had heard some sort of explanation before, but she wanted to be sure.

"He made a wound on my skin and rubbed powder made from an old scab into it. I've heard you can also inhale the powder through your nose, but he didn't have enough for that."

"Hoh, hoh." Maomao nodded; this was definitely worth asking for details. "How bad were your symptoms after the treatment?"

Yo crossed her arms and closed her eyes. "Let's see ... I got a pretty serious fever, but the blisters didn't spread all over my body. Most of the other kids who got the same treatment had similar symptoms, or maybe slightly milder. A few of them hardly had any blisters at all, and their fevers went down after a few days."

"So there are significant variations among individuals." Maomao looked for a notepad so she could write all this down. Yo insisted it wasn't worth it, but Maomao wanted to make sure she remembered.

"Yes, pretty significant, I'd say. It depends somewhat on each person's physical size, but I suspect it mostly has to do with the amount of the toxin they were exposed to. You're working with scabs, right? So it's hard to make sure everyone gets exactly the same amount."

Maomao hmmed and crossed her arms. Yo was intelligent: She could speak objectively while including elements of her own observations and suppositions.

"What happened to the people Kokuyou didn't treat?" Maomao asked.

"My father had had smallpox before, so he just had a minor fever. Everyone who was strong enough left the village when the outbreak began. The only villagers left are my family and a few children. Oh, and one adult survived. Everyone else was killed."

So it wasn't the case, evidently, that once you had smallpox, you could never get it again.

"That's terrible," Maomao said. "What did you do with the bodies?"

"We burned them and then buried the bones," Yo said after a moment of hesitation. "And the houses."

Smallpox could spread just through old scabs. Simply burying the bodies would have been too dangerous. Yet some considered burning a corpse to be blasphemous; doing so must have taken no small amount of courage.

"That's when all of you came to the capital together."

"No, not all of us. The one other surviving adult outside my family went somewhere else. But I want you to know that we were careful to disinfect our clothing before we came into the city, and to be sure that we had completely healed."

She wanted to emphasize that she had not brought plague into the royal capital.

"I know," Maomao said. "And I won't tell anyone about what you did with the corpses." She was starting to think that she would have to interrogate Kokuyou a bit further about smallpox treatment.

I can check with Pops too.

There were plenty of other capable doctors around as well. The older ones might remember something about that outbreak of smallpox.

With all this chatting, Maomao suddenly discovered they were done with their work. "I'm going to take the medicine you've made-come with me, please," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

They would leave the commonly used medicines at the medical office. "We might encounter some rough customers, but just stick with me. Don't let them see that you're afraid, no matter what they say to you," Maomao told Yo.

Maomao's office was near the training grounds where the soldiers practiced, which meant there were a lot of, in her words, rough customers. Yo might still be a bit countrified, but Maomao couldn't have anyone laying a hand on her dear younger colleague.

As they passed by the young men, the soldiers shot them appraising glances. Yo stiffened slightly; Maomao trotted along as if nothing was happening.

When they arrived at the medical office, the elderly doctor was chasing out a soldier who'd come in with a graze. "You call that an injury? That's nothing. Get out of here!" He might look like a grandfatherly old man, but he was an experienced hand in this office and was used to things getting a little mean.

"Couldn't you have just slapped some salve on it to put his mind at ease?" asked Dr. Li, who as a fellow bodybuilder had some sympathy for the soldier.

"I cleaned the injury," the old doctor shot back. "Look, that was the guy who was guffawing about breaking one of the other men's arms the other day. If he thinks he deserves kid gloves, he's going to find all I have for him is some spit and polish."

"Ahh, one of those gutless wonders, eh? I daresay you should have rubbed salt in the wound to disinfect it," said Dr. Li, who sounded more like a musclebrain every day.

"I have medicines to deliver," said Maomao, entering the office and taking off her portable medicine cabinet.

"Delivery's here," Yo echoed, imitating Maomao.

"Well, well, what a sweet young thing you've brought with you today," said the elderly doctor.

"My name is Yo," she told him. "I just started this year." Evidently this was the first time they had met.

"We don't get a lot of young ladies around here. Too many rough- and-tumble types."

"I'm here," Maomao said stiffly.

"You and Miss Chue are special cases. In flower terms, I would say you're an obako and a dandelion."

So she was in the same category as Chue now?

Dr. Li and the elderly physician were both relatively decent toward young women, so Maomao didn't worry about having Yo there. If anything, it made her acutely aware that they must have been thinking the same thing when they assigned Maomao to this office.

That was enough chitchat as far as Maomao was concerned. She resumed her delivery.

"When you deliver new medicines, check the date on any medicines left over," she told Yo. "Put the ones with the oldest date on top, and if they're too old, throw them out."

These deliveries were regular affairs, so they didn't throw too much out. Unlike the rear palace medical office, this was a proper place of business.

I wonder how the quack doctor is doing, Maomao thought.

Luomen was there now, so the rear palace medical office was probably running smoothly. If Maomao had any concerns, they were mostly for the quack doctor's job. It appeared Luomen had been given some new task, however, and Maomao did worry a little bit about how things would go from here.

She noticed there were no injured patients around at that moment, so without slowing in her work, she decided to broach the subject she'd been wondering about. "Have either of you physicians ever had smallpox?"

Yo looked mildly shocked, but she didn't stop refilling the medicine.

"The pox? Doesn't everyone get that?" Dr. Li asked.

"I think you're thinking of something else," Maomao replied. He was probably imagining not smallpox, but chickenpox. Most people did get chickenpox when they were children. Maomao wasn't much clearer on the distinction than Dr. Li was, but smallpox brought you a lot closer to death.

"I have," said the elderly physician, rolling up one of his sleeves to reveal a red pattern on his arm, visible among the spots on his skin. The marks on his arm were much denser than those on Yo's.

Presumably he was only so willing to show his scars because he'd had the disease a long time ago, and everyone in this room understood that he was no longer contagious. Dr. Li, just like Maomao and Yo, looked impassively.

"You're not afraid?" the elderly doctor asked Yo.

"No, sir. I know I can't catch it from you."

"That saves me having to explain, then. Excellent." The physician was relieved by Yo's attitude. Maomao suspected Yao had long ago chased out any palace ladies who would have quailed at the sight.

"Judging by the extent of your scars, it looks like it was a serious case," Maomao said.

"I suppose so. They cover half my back as well. It's not that rare among people of my generation. It was going around at the time, you see. But my first wife looked askance at it."

"First" wife, huh?

"What about the second?" Maomao asked promptly.

"She's a good woman. She's at home, watching over our great- grandchild."

"Wait ... are you feeling lovey-dovey?" Maomao said. The elderly physician only smiled and rolled down his sleeve. "If you'll forgive me saying so, sir, I'm impressed you survived."

"That's fair. At first, we thought it was just chicken pox, but then the symptoms grew more serious. If I hadn't come from a family of doctors, I'm sure I would have died."

"I'm afraid I don't really understand the difference between chickenpox and smallpox," said Dr. Li, and Maomao nodded.

"Yes, well, they do look very similar, although one is much deadlier than the other. I've heard some suggest that the toxins that cause those two diseases must be somehow similar, but not exactly the same."

The elderly physician opened a desk drawer and took out some tea candies, looking for a little break. He offered them to Maomao and the others; Maomao for one accepted them gratefully. Yo looked hesitant, but since this was a venerable old doctor encouraging her to partake, she couldn't really say no.

It was only because the factional fighting among the soldiers had calmed down that they were able to enjoy a quiet snack time like this.

"The toxins that cause those diseases," Maomao breathed.

"Maomao, don't get any ideas about trying them," Dr. Li said.

"Of course not, sir," she answered, albeit slowly, and averting her eyes.

"Not everyone is happy to see smallpox scars, but as a physician they can have certain advantages," the elderly doctor said. "For one thing, it shows you the terror of illness firsthand, and for another, it makes it harder for you to catch the same disease."

"Yes, sir." The response came not from Maomao, but from Yo. For her, the elderly physician might have seemed a savior of a kind.

I'm glad I brought this up while she was around, Maomao thought.

She'd known, at least, that these were not people who would take smallpox lightly; she would never have raised the subject in front of anyone who was likely to make fun of the scars.

"Then again, as you rise through the ranks, it can be a liability," the elderly doctor went on. "If you have two physicians with the same qualifications, setting aside any noble background, they'll take the one with fewer scars."

Maomao was silent at that. Presently, Dr. Liu was the one in charge of the physicians. He was an excellent doctor, no doubt, but considering their ages, this old man could easily have outranked him. One presumed there were no issues with his abilities or his family background.

Maomao and the others began to feel a bit uncomfortable.

"Well, my dear Liu is a clever man, more gifted than I am, so there's no problem there. I think I would be too frightened to be His Majesty's personal physician."

"His Majesty's personal physician ... I agree, I don't have the stomach for it. I wouldn't, no matter how many stomachs I had!" Dr. Li said.

Personal attendant to the Emperor, huh?

They were right; that was a job Maomao would never want. It brought honor with it, certainly, but even more, it brought responsibility. If the Emperor should fall sick or, heavens forbid, die, his physician might well pay with his life. Indeed, Luomen had suffered physical mutilation on account of a medical case involving the Imperial family.

I just hope they wouldn't punish him again now that they've called him back ...

Maomao sighed as she poured some tea.

"Oh, yes, that's right," the old doctor said, standing up and taking an envelope from atop his desk. "This came for you, Maomao."

"You, er, don't think you should have given this to me first thing?"

"My mistake. Us old folks can be so forgetful."

Maomao took the packet. On the front in large letters was written NOTICE OF REASSIGNMENT.