The Great Doctor: Starting Out at an Old Street Clinic

During the Jinghe era of the Dayin dynasty, traveling physician Liu Yishou falls off a cliff while gathering herbs. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself sitting outside the emergency room of a modern hospital.

He has no money, his identity is a mystery, and his only support is the skill in his fingertips, which can determine life and death with a touch of the wrist, along with a family heirloom, the Liu Family Acupuncture Manual.

He has no true qi or inner power, and he can't pronounce anyone dead from a distance. He treats heart attacks by tapping the elbows to release sha, stops three-year hiccups with two needles at Zanzhu, brings down children's fevers with massage and spine-pinching, and relieves the agony of shingles with encircling fire needling. With nothing but his own hands, he sets up shop at Huichuntang on an old street in the southern part of the city. He starts by setting bones and cupping for the longtime residents, then stuns everyone with consultations on difficult cases at the municipal hospital and a lecture at the provincial capital's medical conference.

He isn't arrogant or conceited about modern medicine. He believes that "the patient should benefit the most, and the doctor's pride matters the least." He neither courts nor chases online traffic. He only finds the little box at the convenience store that calls everyone "family" annoying, and occasionally slurps a couple of sips of milk tea alongside the homemade pickles his neighbors bring him.

Then, one late night, a luxury car pulls up at his door, exposing a family secret buried for a thousand years. When the two volumes of the acupuncture manual are brought together, a leading modern neurologist trembles and falls to his knees, calling him "ancestor." Faced with a case of ALS that has baffled the entire world, the young physician, barely into his thirties, rolls up his cloth sleeves. "Who says the medical classics offer no way forward? Today, I'll tear down this wall!"

This is the story of an ancient traveling physician who makes his place in a steel jungle through skill and stakes his life on compassion. Surrounded by disciples and their own students, people rooted in the everyday world, he carries on the backbone of the medical tradition.