Great Tang: The Doctor Doesn’t Call on Patients, From the Start I Extend Changle’s Life

In the eighth year of the Zhenguan era, autumn rain poured down.

The Taiji Hall was shrouded in despair. Six imperial physicians knelt on the shattered golden bricks, kowtowing and begging to be put to death. The Tang emperor, Li Shimin, clutched an unsheathed horizontal saber and stared with bloodshot eyes at Princess Changle, who lay on the dragon bed, barely breathing.

“If you can't cure her, all of you will be buried with her.”

Just as despair filled the entire hall, a street doctor wearing broken straw sandals, covered in mud, and without a single decent garment was kicked into the hall by the Imperial Guards.

Everyone thought this bell-ringing quack, who knew nothing about medicine, was as good as dead.

But the doctor neither knelt nor panicked. He simply washed the mud from his hands in a copper basin in the corner, opened his battered wooden medicine chest, took out a three-inch silver needle, and, ignoring the horrified protests of the imperial physicians, plunged it without hesitation into the princess's death point.

One needle, and the dead drew breath.

The doctor put away the needle, wiped his hands on his clothes, slung the medicine chest over his shoulder, and turned toward the rainy night. “This needle can only keep her alive for three years. Don't take the palace medicine anymore. From now on, come see me at the West Market clinic on the first day of every month.”

The entire court stood dumbfounded.

From that day on, Chang'an had one less princess waiting to die. And at the leaky, shabby clinic in the West Market, there was a stunning female doctor in a coarse cloth dress and hairpins, obediently sitting on a little stool on the first of every month, brewing medicine for her patients.