In 1911, the last page of imperial China was pierced by gunfire at the top of Wuchang City. History is split into two parts here. The coffin of the old era has not yet been nailed, and the baby of the new world is already struggling in a pool of blood. In this huge birth that affected 40 million people, three scalpels quietly opened the abscess of the times.
Sun Xi, a gentle and elegant trainee doctor in the concession hospital, was forced to suture the wounds of his compatriots under the scrutiny of foreigners; Fang Sanxiang, a doctor as tough as a wolf in the Guandong epidemic area, tested the edge of modern medicine in the mountains of corpses and seas of blood; Yao Yingzi, the daughter of a wealthy businessman in the south of the Yangtze River, broke free from the embroidery building and used bandages to measure the price of revolution. They have never met, but together they heard the most primitive cry of life when the nation was in danger.
This is not a heroic epic, but a microscopic map of the doctor among the folds of history. When artillery fire tears apart the boundaries of ethics, and when the plague becomes an accomplice of politics, they use quinine bottles as shields and silver needles as spears. In the cracks between factions and great powers, they practice an oath older than doctrine - to save people.
The author presses the stethoscope on the chest of China in the year of 1911 with a cold yet tender writing style. What we hear is not only the gunshots of warlords fighting and the arguments for reform and reform, but also the first cries of new lives in the delivery room, the suppressed coughs in the isolation ward, and the faint sound of weeds breaking through the soil on the mass graves. These voices finally converged into one question: When the fever of the entire civilization persists, should the cure be given to individuals or to the era?
I dedicate this book to all those who hold lamps in the darkness. They know that the night is long, but they always believe that every glimmer of light is the prelude to dawn.
