"My condolences to your family, elder Brol," I said, laying a hand on the burly elderly man's shoulder.
Elder Brol slowly nodded his head, his usual boisterous nature quelled by his sadness. The old man had been crying for a while, with his many family members trying to comfort him while they themselves were overcome with emotion. In front of them, lay a dead child, not more than ten years old. He held one of the toys I'd been making for the past few days, in his cold lifeless hands. He'd held on to it tightly all night, even as his health had worsened and his body had finally given up.
For much of their existence, even on my Earth, human beings have had short life spans. Childhood mortality rates have been sky high since the beginning, with many mothers dying of childbirth. Those children that do survive their first, most dangerous years of life, may well lose their lives to disease before they entered adulthood. Even after that, adults rarely achieved the long lifespans that the humans of my world had taken for granted. Most humans in this prehistoric world would not live to the age of forty.
And the sorrowful scene in front of me was a reminder of this grim reality. And the worst part was, I was about to make things a whole lot worse. Shifting from a hunter gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle was a recipe for medical disaster. So many humans in such close proximity for prolonged periods of time would surely breed disease and unsanitary conditions. I could make things better by building proper sanitation networks with drains and waste disposal, as well as by spreading soap the way I had already started to, but it wasn't going to be enough.
It had been several weeks since we had arrived at this new, unnamed settlement. The tribesmen had already begun sowing seeds, and gathering and preserving food for the winter. Piles of salt and salted meat, the first batches of wine-like drinks were being made into vinegar, and many fruits were being dried as much as possible in the hopes of sealing them inside hardened clay vessels. The Oko and Imm tribes had made several expeditions far into the tundra, marking spaces where meat could be frozen, and several herds of monsters had been corralled and many eggs were being warmed by sufficiently distant fires. Things were coming along nicely, but the many deaths that I had been witnessing now that I was fully immersed within the tribes, had been very disconcerting for someone who came from the modern world, like me. It had never been a problem in the elfin tribes, since elves seemed to be very resistant to disease and lived for many, many years.
"Are you sure it's okay?" I asked, facing the crying elder.
He nodded his head and looked away. Most of the other family members looked on, which proved to me that death was so common here, especially among children, that most people took it in stride. Only the elder was strange, because he was fond of his grandchildren, even though he knew many of them would die young.
I took my sharp copper dagger and covered my mouth and nose with a rag. I made an incision in the skin and began dissecting the corpse, making sure that my hands were covered in the treated leather gloves that I had haphazardly shaped for this occasion. This child had been sick for a while now, and I had been trying to treat him to the best of my ability. However, the tribesmen knew he wasn't long for this world, and I had managed to get his family's permission to cut him up to help me save the lives of many children in the future.
It was quite a gruesome and nauseating process, navigating the human body from the inside. The first thing I did was to note if all the organs were in the same places as they were in humans from my Earth. They were. Then, I checked inside some of the major organs, like the lungs and the heart, to see if they were the same. They were. After some more experiments, I was able to conclude, that the humans of this world had the same body as the humans of my world. Whether this meant that the medical knowledge of my world would apply the same way in this world, I couldn't say for certain. At least not until I did some more experiments on germs and microorganisms.
I helped bury the child myself, following the traditions of the Ibog tribe. I gingerly clasped his hands around the toy as we lowered him into the ground, and spoke some words over his grave to help console the still grieving elder Brol. His family eventually managed to drag him away, and I went to the river with some soap to clean my hands. I threw away some of the bloody rags I had used, but washed the gloves so they could be used again. This may have been the first body that I had cut open, but it would certainly not be the last.
I had already started spreading sanitary practices among the tribesmen, and insisted that water be treated to my satisfaction, especially before it was drunk by kids. I made a simple water filtration system out of sand, rocks, gravel and charcoal, although I wasn't sure how helpful the charcoal would be, since it wasn't the special activated kind used in filtration systems in my world. Still, I was hoping that boiling it after putting it through the system would keep the worst of water-borne illnesses at bay.
I knew medical magic had to be one of my top priorities if I wanted to help the tribesmen succeed. And I definitely needed them to survive and prosper, in order for me to achieve my goals. After cutting open the child's body, and doing a few more tests on water and fungi, I felt like I was ready to start working on modern medicine.
I had been tempted to use pre-modern concepts like herbology and the Greek four humors to invent some sort of inefficient but usable medical magic spells, but realized quite quickly that it would probably be faster and more efficient to just jump straight to modern medicine. I realized, however, that I could make some usable magic out of the Greek four humors in particular, which was a system of medicine that relied on 'balancing' the four 'humors' within a human body. The wisdom required to judge what a balance of four whole substances was, would be tough, so I had to make a spell that did not rely on balance.
'Humorism' as it was sometimes called, looked to balance blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, but I had no idea what it meant to balance or work with these substances. I did know that they had different characteristics, and that the theory placed a lot of importance on the liver, but beyond that, I didn't know too much about it.
I ended up making a single spell from this flawed theory, since it didn't take too much effort. I called the spell 'mood regulation.' It wasn't a psychological spell, that let me control people's emotional state. All it did was help me calm someone down by balancing the essence of the four humors in their body. The spell only worked when someone was in pain from disease, and not from wounds, but it had already proven useful. I'd used it to make the little boy's exit from this world just a little bit less painful.
The spell was based on a justified belief, but the truth part was kind of debatable. I knew the next step I had to take was to work on three things: vaccines, antibiotics, and germ theory.
"Are there any monsters you know that also get smallpox?" I asked Kelser, who had been tagging along like always.
"Smallpox?" he asked.
I described the disease. I hadn't seen any children with smallpox so far, but I felt like it was worth a try. The problem with diseases in this world was that there was no guarantee they would work the same way they did in my world. There was no reason for there to be smallpox in this world, and there was no reason for there to be something like cowpox, which was used to invent the first inoculations back on my Earth.
Somehow, it looked like a similar disease existed in this world, and that the herds of animals we were managing on the plains had a disease just like it. I brought in an infected animal's carcass, and examined the pus. It looked like it might work. It was gross and there were no guarantees, but I figured it was worth the risk. I inoculated myself, first, and waited in case there were side effects. In a few days, I began inoculating some more people. I didn't inoculate everyone, both because I needed to compare outcomes and just in case this monster disease was actually really dangerous. Thankfully, it looked like the disease was at least safe in humans and elves, although I could not speak for the effectiveness, just yet.
I spent a few more days working on medical magic, before gathering my strength, and making a trip to the sea.