Chapter 842 — Young Master Bing Is Brilliant: "He Fell Ill from Offending Wei Zhao? What Does That Mean? Could His Sickness Have Been Inflicted by Wei Zhao?" Yao Wang Brooded Over Wei Zhao, Ever Convinced That in Medical Skill, If He Claimed Second Place in the Secular World, None Would Dare Claim First!
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"Naturally. Hmph, is there not a Doctor Guan and a Divine Doctor Kang and such? We shall launch a Zhao Yao Wang. Once our name spreads, we shall ask whatever price we please and have it!" Zhao Qibing said smugly.
"By Young Master Bing's account, the plan is quite workable!" Yao Wang raised no objection. He was by nature sinister and venomous. Curing only to harm again was his forte, and by this method the profit from a single patient would be far more than a mere million yuan!
Medical skill can save men, but it can also harm them. Those who study medicine master the structure of the human body, and practitioners of Chinese medicine especially can through certain means manufacture symptoms of disease!
Nowadays, the vast majority of doctors study medicine to save lives. Even where some are mercenary and work only for money, once paid they still go and save the patient.
But some are not so. They delve into medicine not to save men, but to harm them! Such men began as close retainers in the palace and in the households of princes and nobles. They manufactured illnesses for no other purpose than to let certain princes and ministers feign sickness before the emperor and slip away from the eye of the storm.
For example, when two factions contended at court and a prince or chief minister wished to take no part, he would plead illness and retire to avoid the affair, and the emperor naturally would not believe him but send imperial physicians to examine him. At such times these men served their purpose, fabricating ills convincing enough to deceive even the imperial physicians.
Yet with the changing of dynasties, some of these men scattered among the fallen nobility into the common world, setting up on their own and traveling among rich squires and landlords, treating these moneyed men exclusively. Only having grown used to great sums in princely households, these consultation fees no longer satisfied their appetites, so when they treated some tycoon they would never cure him outright, always holding something back, then collecting steep fees again and again until the tycoon's money was squeezed dry. Then, according to their whim, they would either cure him wholly or simply ignore him and let him live or die on his own.
So these men could not be called anything but venomous. Of course, in present society few of their kind remain. After so long, many of their arts have been lost and many have changed trades. Only a handful, having no choice, abandoned their old ways to serve great families as private physicians.