“In this bottle,” he said, “is the future of surgery. A chemical compound of my own devising. It’s true, what my grandfather wrote in his book, that sometimes a physician must act as apothecary, and in so doing, I have discovered something extraordinary. It is—gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me—nothing short of a miracle.” There were murmurs of disapproval and interest, a few canes banging on the steps, but Dr. Beecham continued: “I have single-handedly devised the secret that will render all surgery painless.
This time, even Hazel could not help laughing. Dr. Beecham smiled slightly and eyed the crowd. “Soon enough, my friends, soon enough. But before we begin, I think I should demonstrate one more of my inventions.” He tilted his head, and then came a pop and a hiss and the sound of tinkling glass, and the stage erupted in blinding white light.
Hazel lifted her sleeve to shield her eyes. Beecham was the only one who didn’t wince at the sudden brightness. The stage was circled with gas lamps Hazel hadn’t seen in the darkness, all connected by tubes, now lit brighter than Hazel had ever seen indoors. “The future,” Beecham said, “is gas lamps. With a few modifications, I’ve found that they make what we undertake in the surgical hall far easier.”
The men applauded. Beecham nodded slightly, bowing to their praise. And then, once the crowd had calmed, he looked at the bottle in his hand. The blue-violet fluid inside seemed to be swirling. Now that the room was lit, Hazel saw its color properly, deep sapphire laced with silver. The gas lamps were so bright that neither Beecham nor the bottle seemed to have a shadow.
Beecham lifted his vial higher, and then uncorked it. For a moment, Hazel smelled a strange sweetness, like wildflowers and rot. Then, from another coat pocket, the doctor pulled a white handkerchief, embroidered with the initials W. B. He held the handkerchief aloft like a magician before plunging it into the blue bottle. When he withdrew the handkerchief, Hazel got another momentary whiff of the wildflower-rot smell. There was another scent uncorked in the vial, too, something specific, but Hazel couldn’t identify it.
Dr. Beecham approached the terrified patient, holding the handkerchief. Though the two stocky men held him down firmly, the patient continued to wriggle as much as he was able. Beecham smiled, but he didn’t show his teeth.
He turned to the audience. “Gentlemen, I give you ethereum. Or, what I have taken to calling in the laboratory ‘the Scotsman’s dodge.’” There were murmurs of confusion and interest in the stands. A few of the men stomped their feet, which caused a spider to fall into Hazel’s hair.
While the patient struggled, Dr. Beecham pressed the handkerchief firmly against his face, muffling his cries. The struggling stopped. The men in the stands were silent. Beecham gracefully plucked the bone saw from his assistant’s tray and began his work sawing at the disfigured leg.
It took fewer than five strokes back and forth and less than a minute before the leg fell with a sickeningly wet thud into the sawdust below. Beecham’s face never changed, even as a spattering of blood painted a bright red line from his forehead to his upper lip. He exchanged his saw for a long metal instrument with a hook on its end, and then pulled at a few of the still-bleeding veins inside what remained of the patient’s leg. He tied each of them into a neat square knot, and then nodded at another assistant, who began to wrap the bleeding stump in linen.
Throughout the entire thing, the patient never woke or cried out. He slept like a child with pleasant dreams. “The Scotsman’s dodge, gentlemen,” Dr. Beecham said quietly.
The room erupted into wild applause. Several more spiders fell onto Hazel. Whether it was the angle, or the candlelight, or the look of supreme confidence on his face, Hazel saw exactly how much Dr. Beecham resembled the ink etching of his grandfather from the first page of Dr. Beecham’s Treatise. The small nose, the lowered brow, even the deep dimples that revealed themselves with only the hint of a smile. It was uncanny. It was unmistakable. The only difference was the blood still slowly dripping down the living Beecham’s chin.
Beecham’s assistants got to work tidying the stage, wiping the blood from the table, and carrying the mangled leg away. The sawdust where the leg had fallen was so dark with blood it almost looked black, even in the grotesque brightness of Beecham’s lamp. By the time they were finished, the patient was blinking himself awake. “Is it—？” he said.
“Over,” Dr. Beecham said. The audience erupted once more.
Hazel was dizzy with the heat and the smell of hot, coppery blood and visions of what she had just seen. A surgery! With her own two eyes! Flesh, mottled and damaged, cut away to reveal the clean bright red beneath, those veins and arteries tied with the deft skill of a master with an embroidery needle. And, most thrilling of all, that concoction, that ethereum, whatever it was that had put the patient to sleep.