"The patient had suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis for over six months. Various medications for symptomatic treatment, including cough suppressants and fever reducers, had proved ineffective. Once the procedure was performed, the coughing of blood stopped immediately. By the next day, his cough had eased and become less frequent, and he reported that his chest pain and feverish discomfort also seemed to be improving."
While the day's discussions were mostly focused on what to eat for the next meal, a report so fantastical it seemed like a work of fiction was circulated around the long table.
The gist was that, without anyone realizing it, a professor from Rivers University had teamed up with the anatomy lecturer at this hospital and gone to a former student's internal medicine clinic to perform surgical treatment on tuberculosis patients—with remarkable results.
The graduate, who deeply regretted having neglected some subjects back in school, faithfully recorded everything he had witnessed during the treatment. At the end, he added a note full of doubt: "Professor Kraft insists that this procedure still only serves to delay the course of the disease."
The shock of an immediate result was always among the most powerful. Years of carefully combining remedies and collecting folk cures suddenly seemed utterly pointless, even a little like clownish theatrics.
At first, the clinic's patient count merely doubled. But when the second and third cases appeared, followed by a dozen more, rumors were bound to spread far less cautiously than a case report written for a university.
A long description, hundreds of words and full of qualifications, would gradually be pared down as it spread into one deeply oversimplified but compelling question: Could it be cured?
If it could, then there was little more to say. For the first time, the White Death's advance had been