Chapter 312: Bairen General Hospital
Taking in a maid was hardly a significant matter. If she truly was as capable as described, Chen Tianxiong could use her—he didn't have a woman anyway.
"Very well. Have her come by tomorrow for a look," Wen Tong said absently.
"Thank you, Master, for your grace!" Ah Zhu arched her body fawningly and began sliding slowly downward toward his groin. She took him gently into her mouth and gave a delicate lick with the tip of her tongue. He shuddered entirely, stiffening again instantly.
I'll have to teach her some fresh techniques later, Wen Tong thought. The notion flickered briefly through his mind before consciousness dissolved into the rising tide of pleasure.
"The Dean is making rounds!"
The moment the Head Nurse's high-pitched voice rang through the corridor, every ward and office in Bairen General Hospital tensed in anticipation. This was the routine Monday Dean's Grand Rounds. All chief physicians were required to attend. The first batch of Health School graduates—newly capped and promoted to formal nurses—and their juniors, the second-batch interns, hurried to open ward doors and arrange themselves in the corridor. They stood in respectful stillness, scarcely breathing, awaiting the arrival of the figure who loomed godlike in their minds.
The main door of the Chief's Office building swung open. Shi Niaoren emerged, one hand tucked casually into the pocket of his crisp white coat, his broad shoulders and imposing frame leading the procession. A step behind walked the department chiefs, faces taut, white coats pressed to knife-edge creases—ironing physicians' coats was among the designated duties of Bairen General Hospital's nurses—stethoscopes gleaming around their necks.
"Good morning, Doctors!" Led by Head Nurse Zhang Ziyi, all nurses and interns bowed and spoke in unison. The gathering was modest, but the effect was striking.
"Good morning. Thank you for your efforts." Shi Niaoren acknowledged them with a nod. The chiefs always felt a twinge of awkwardness at this moment—after all, only one person was truly entitled to say, "Comrades, thank you for your hard work." The inspection team was customarily led by Shi Niaoren, the highest-ranking People's Commissar of Health and Dean of Bairen General Hospital. In this new timeline, his US-earned doctorate and professorship in infectious diseases still commanded considerable weight.
The inpatient building rose three stories. The first and second floors housed ordinary wards—ten rooms per floor, six beds per room. The third floor was designated the "Senior Cadre Ward"—in practice, reserved for transmigrators. It too had ten rooms, but only three beds each.
Currently, about thirty patients occupied the ordinary wards. Most cases involved muscle contusions, fractures, traumatic infections, and common ailments: upper respiratory infections with fever, acute gastroenteritis. In recent days, a batch of wounded had been admitted—sailors and artillerymen from the Great Whale, injured in the Battle of Juhua Islet. Their wounds were mostly minor burns and punctures from iron shrapnel.
Most didn't truly require hospitalization; once their wounds were dressed, they'd be fine. Only a few had serious injuries. Such wounds, provided they didn't damage major vessels or organs, weren't difficult to treat. Even fighting infection was far easier than in the old timeline—antibiotics like sulfonamides worked almost miraculously.
The only thing troubling the physicians was tetanus antitoxin. This item was growing scarce, and its shelf life was limited. Once exhausted, wounded men would have to rely on luck.
For ordinary patients, the rounds consisted of reviewing the bedside chart and inquiring whether any abnormalities had been observed. Yet even in such basic matters, Shi Niaoren frequently uncovered problems.
"Why doesn't this patient have a morning temperature reading?" Dean Shi began to flare—how many times had he emphasized this? "Who was on duty?"
"Reporting to Master—"
"Dean!" Shi Niaoren thundered. "Say it again: call me Dean!" The address "Master" marked the speaker as a Health School student; formal nurses knew better.
"It's me—" The student wore a blue nurse's uniform. Because she wasn't yet a formal nurse, she wore only a blue triangular kerchief instead of a proper cap.
"Who are you?"
"Hou Qing."
Hou Qing appeared thin and slight. By 21st-century standards she might pass for fifteen or sixteen, but she was actually in her early twenties—considered an old maid in this era. She and her brother, Hou Wenyong, were refugees recently brought in by the Guangzhou Station.
"Why didn't you take the temperature?"
"Ashamed... I was too ashamed—" The girl actually covered her face, looking as though she might cry.
The explanation emerged quickly: to prevent patients from biting through thermometers, temperatures here were taken rectally. In other words, the nurse had to "violate" the patient's posterior.
Patients certainly weren't accustomed to it. But asking these young women—born in an age where "men and women should not touch"—to perform such an act on a grown man they'd never met was even more difficult.
Early on, someone had suggested introducing a male nurse system, but Shi Niaoren had rejected the idea outright. "You all understand perfectly well: medical workers have no gender! If they cannot step over this threshold, what's the point of discussing the training of qualified indigenous medical personnel?"
Of course, such transformations couldn't happen overnight. Nine out of ten new students couldn't accept it initially; they had to be educated gradually. Shi Niaoren sighed and turned to Zhang Ziyi.
"Teach her properly."
With that, he moved to the next bed.
"What is this about?"
Every round uncovered problems. Either basic temperature readings were missed, or medical records were written incorrectly. The first batch of Health School graduates remained fundamentally immature in many respects—they had crammed into six months what their counterparts in the other timeline took four years to learn, and many had only recently risen above functional illiteracy.
After reprimanding the nurse who had erred and watching her correct the mistake on the spot, Shi Niaoren exhaled slowly. There is progress. At least the nurses no longer dropped to their knees, begging his "mercy" the moment he raised his voice, as they had in the early days. Instilling modern medical concepts remained a heavy responsibility with a long road ahead.
After inspecting the ordinary wards, the group proceeded to the Senior Cadre Ward, where only two patients currently resided.
"You Laohu. Army Company Commander. Acute enteritis," reported the duty nurse, Guo Fu.
Shi Niaoren took the medical chart and examined it. The handwriting was crooked, but the format was correct. Fasting temperature at 6 AM: 37.4 degrees. Slightly feverish.
He handed the chart to Lan Yangyang, the gastroenterology specialist.
"Did you have diarrhea last night?"
"Twice."
Lan Yangyang conducted a further examination and asked follow-up questions.
This patient had contracted acute enteritis from eating wild fruits during field training the previous day. His face had been green when they carried him in. Lan Yangyang had worked through half the night to stabilize him. He remained on a glucose drip.
"You're fine, just fine. We'll have you healthy and bounding around in no time," Shi Niaoren reassured the mournful-faced You Laohu in an amiable tone.
"Don't eat anything today. Have some rice porridge tonight, rest well, and you'll be jumping around tomorrow." Lan Yangyang sought to bolster the patient's confidence.
"Thank you, Doctor." You Laohu—normally eager to flirt with the hospital's young nurses—had no energy whatsoever. Even with a pretty nurse standing before him, he couldn't summon the slightest interest.
"Tell the Army Club to get you a duck to nourish your body when you get back, hehe." Shi Niaoren remained all smiles. "And don't eat things like wild fruits anymore."
"Definitely not—" You Laohu, usually strong as an ox, was now weak even in speech. Indeed, a hero cannot withstand three bouts of diarrhea.
Shi Niaoren's tone changed entirely as he approached the other bed. A fat man lay there, groaning theatrically, but his complexion was suspiciously robust.
"I say, Fatty Xi!" Shi Niaoren was blunt from the opening words. This patient had checked in after returning from the Great Whale. His injury was genuinely minor—not even requiring stitches—far below the threshold for hospitalization. "How long do you intend to freeload here?"
"Doctor, I've been experiencing some muscle twitching. Could it be the first stage of tetanus?" The man groaned from his pillow.
"You are perfectly healthy!" Shi Niaoren said. "How many times have I told you? All transmigrators received tetanus immunizations. Your wound isn't deep, and the medic treated it properly. Where would tetanus come from?"
"That's not guaranteed." Xi Yazhou sounded feeble. "For the sake of the Party and the State, just give me a shot of serum..."
He had made this request several times over the past few days. Shi Niaoren shook his head in exasperation. The man clearly wouldn't leave without an injection. But he was unwilling to waste the limited serum supply on someone who wasn't sick—they couldn't manufacture this serum; every vial used was one fewer remaining.
"Fine—you've worn me down," he said at last. "Get discharged after the shot." Leaving the ward, he called Zhang Ziyi over quietly.
"Give him an injection of saline. Make it sting. Tell him it's the serum."
Having disposed of this matter, Shi Niaoren returned to his Dean's Office and lit a cigarette. As a physician, he wasn't restricted to "Holy Ship" brand cigarettes; all heavy smokers in the health department smoked the filtered cigarettes brought from the other timeline. These were typically gifts from grateful patients.
Everything is hard at the beginning. Shi Niaoren watched the smoke rings drift upward. The transmigrators were justifiably proud of their health department. In this timeline, the medical knowledge, skills, and specific drugs they possessed were enough to make every doctor in the Ministry of Health a "Miracle Worker." But they were far from omnipotent.
When that transmigrator—the one who had accidentally fallen from the wall during the attack on Gou Family Village, overexcited and careless—died silently in the medical team's tent, Shi Niaoren and all the medical workers felt a powerful sense of helplessness for the first time. The traumatic brain injury might have been salvageable in the old timeline; here, they could only watch him slip away.
At the time, fearing damage to morale, and with the Executive Committee's approval, the body of this obscure transmigrator was quietly buried in the wasteland behind Bopu Health Center, awaiting a suitable opportunity to be reinterred in the Martyrs' Cemetery. Fortunately, they hadn't been ashore long then, and personnel transfers were constant; the man was quickly forgotten.
"But it cannot always be like this," Shi Niaoren murmured to himself. A thousand things demanded his attention.
Since the completion of Bairen General Hospital's infrastructure, he had been contemplating the establishment of a rudimentary medical system. They lacked neither basic equipment nor medicines; though doctors were few and their specialties somewhat unbalanced, they could manage. What they didn't have was a complete medical system—no, not even a primary one.
After several discussions, the Health Department had decided to first build Bairen General Hospital into a model unit, perfecting its systems to serve as a template for all future medical institutions—much as Wu Nanhai had done with his demonstration farm.
Currently, thanks to their efforts, this general hospital possessed five basic departments: Internal Medicine, Surgery, Infectious Diseases, ENT, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. It had a pharmacy, a radiology room, and a laboratory center. They had also taken over the Sanitation Class originally under the Military and Political School and established a Health School, training a cohort of nurses and military medics. By modern standards, these personnel weren't even as qualified as the barefoot doctors trained in the 1970s—but something was better than nothing.
All physicians had been given the title of Chief—naturally, no one among the transmigrators was more qualified. But these Chief Physicians of Bairen General Hospital couldn't afford the fastidiousness of doctors in major hospitals. They had no flock of graduate or undergraduate students to perform the grunt work. There wasn't even a qualified pharmacist. Taking X-rays, performing ultrasounds... they even had to compound medicines themselves when necessary.
Qian Shuiting's wife, Ai Beibei, originally worked in pathological research within epidemiology—not outpatient care. Now she had to moonlight as a gynecologist as well. Even 21st-century women often preferred female gynecologists; in 17th-century China, the reluctance was orders of magnitude greater.
For the most common internal medicine and infectious disease cases, Shi Niaoren had written "Guidelines for the Treatment of Common Diseases in Hainan," given the lack of specialist physicians. He ranked common ailments—intestinal diseases, respiratory diseases, malaria, surface bacterial infections, gynecological diseases—then detailed treatment protocols for each, improving efficiency and reducing misdiagnosis.
Medical record formats had to be handwritten by doctors personally to serve as models for nurses and future interns. Drug use was institutionalized: all specific drugs and non-routine medications required his personal approval; anesthetic dosages had to adhere closely to the lower limit of the theoretical dose. Anesthesiology was actually a critical specialty where inexperience killed—but none of them were truly proficient in it. If something went wrong, there wouldn't even be a chance for resuscitation.
As for the laboratory center, Shi Niaoren hoped to expand it—to enable medical testing, disease prevention, the compilation of prevention manuals, and the formulation of rational disease control strategies. However, a prevention and control system required administrative power for enforcement; it would have to wait until the organizational framework was finalized.
Finally, there was the matter of the pharmaceutical factory commencing production. This could brook no delay. The glass factory could now supply them with sufficient specialized equipment. The bacterial strains brought by He Ping's wife remained in the laboratory. These couldn't be stored indefinitely; they had to be put into production as soon as possible. Chemical pharmaceuticals couldn't be counted on for the time being...
"Dean, everyone has arrived. Shall we begin?"
(End of Chapter)