Great Physician Ling Ran

Great Physician Ling Ran is an urban medical novel by Zhi Niao Cun, an author on Qidian, the Chinese web-novel platform of Yuewen Group. It began serialization on Qidian on May 14, 2018, and is complete at 1,444 chapters and about 3.4877 million Chinese characters. The protagonist, Ling Ran, is a student at Yunhua University Medical School. He is strikingly handsome and so focused as to be almost stubborn, with one small goal in mind: to become the greatest doctor in the world. During his clinical internship, he enters the emergency department of Yunhua University Affiliated Hospital. With a master-level suturing technique he obtains by chance, he keeps honing basic procedures such as debridement and suturing, intradermal suturing, and perineurial anastomosis. He then encounters finger replantation, Achilles tendon repair, and even extremely difficult large-scale combined operations, gradually making the "contest of millimeters" on the operating table part of his daily life. Unlike traditional medical fiction, the work focuses on "technique" itself: every technical advance corresponds to a real problem behind a specific case, and details such as surgical procedures, departmental division of labor, consultations, and papers are written with considerable care. The author spent long periods observing in hospitals, and many medical readers therefore find the numerous medical terms and procedural descriptions close to reality. The narrative unfolds in a humorous tone, and the colleagues, nurses, resident trainees, and all kinds of patients in the hospital together form a lively and warm picture of hospital life. This book is the first volume of the series' print publication and covers Ling Ran's entry into the emergency department for his internship and the beginning of his career starting from suturing; it includes chapters such as "Reward," "Perineurial Anastomosis," and "Hundred-Year Beach Sanatorium." The book was permanently archived by the National Library of China in 2020, selected for the British Library's Chinese collection in 2022, and won the second Tianma Literature Prize in 2023.