The Physician 1879

The Physician 1879 is a long-form medical web novel by the online author Cao Xi, written after The Physician and serialized on Qidian. It runs to roughly 2.2 million characters. The story opens in 1879, the fifth year of the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty, just as the world stands on the brink of great scientific advances: Edison has shown the electric light to the world, and Einstein is born in Germany; but the X-ray will not be discovered for another sixteen years, aspirin and The Interpretation of Dreams will wait twenty, insulin forty-three, and penicillin forty-eight. None of the milestones in medical history that would change humanity's fate have yet arrived. The protagonist, John Huntral, armed with knowledge and technology from the future, is, in a welter of emotions, taken aboard an ocean liner back to his mother's homeland, America. The novel does not rush to make its protagonist omnipotent from the start; instead he begins as a surgeon, practicing medicine and saving lives in an era of crude conditions and low status. Step by step he brings to fruition medical and technological inventions ahead of their time, while being drawn into side plots involving real historical figures and events—Edison, the electric light, batteries, bicycles, flying machines—and ultimately changes the age through medical research and technological innovation, also touching the historical threads of modern Chinese medical education and Peking Union Medical College. The book's greatest distinction is its flavor of popular science and history: the author dwells at length on the history of modern medicine, unfolding it layer by layer from surgery and diagnosis to drug development, and readers regard it as a rare medical novel that is professional and solid amid the many urban fictions that merely wear a doctor's skin. Though the main plot is relatively thin and the pacing slow, its information density is high, suiting readers willing to read slowly and interested in the history of medicine and technology.