"Cough, cough, cough... So, you are a protégé of Master Wu? Please, come in at once!" Upon learning the visitor's identity, Zhang Xianzhong, who had been lying on his sickbed, struggled to sit up.
Wu Youxing had previously been a minor itinerant physician with little fame. However, when a severe plague broke out across Shandong, Zhejiang, and the two Zhili provinces during the fourteenth year of the Emperor Chongzhen reign, the casualties were immense. By the fifth and sixth lunar months, the situation had worsened, with entire households being wiped out. To combat this, Wu had ventured deep into the plague-stricken regions, treating patients while analyzing the epidemic. After many trials, he formulated a decoction known as "Dayuan Yin" that could alleviate and cure the plague, which brought him great renown among the common people.
Wu believed that the pestilence was caused by "pestilential qi" entering the body through the mouth and nose—what modern medicine would call airborne and contact transmission. However, the medical establishment of the time dismissed this theory as dangerous heresy, leaving Wu to practice among the commoners without official recognition. Believing that if the master were a brilliant physician, his students must be equally capable, Zhang Xianzhong had immediately ordered the doctor to be brought in.
Chapter 429