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Wei Lan began preparing medical supplies. The most urgently needed items were four things: cleaning solution, disinfectant, gauze, and sterile equipment.
The first issue was cleaning wounds. Without sterile saline solution, she planned to use boiled and cooled water as a substitute. Market salt was too impure and expensive, making it impossible to prepare her own saline for now.
The second was disinfectant. Modern povidone-iodine was out of the question, so she thought of 75% medical alcohol. As long as she had distillation equipment and an initial alcohol source, she could make it. She remembered the structure of a distillation apparatus clearly and was confident she could recreate it.
Third was gauze. Wei Lan noticed that the locals used gauze to make mosquito nets. The curtain beside her bed was also made of gauze, so she could cut it, sterilize it, and use it directly.
Lastly, sterilization. Without access to high-pressure steam sterilization, she planned to boil needles and gauze in water, dry them in the sun, and store them in a clean container.
Wei Lan wrote down these plans in detail. When Liu Mingyi returned home, she immediately presented her ideas for feedback.
Liu Mingyi set down his medicine box and, after listening, responded directly, “Sangpi thread, needles, and gauze aren’t hard to find.”
Wei Lan asked, “Sangpi thread is made from mulberry bark?”
“Yes,” Liu Mingyi explained. “You strip the outer bark of the mulberry root, remove the hard yellow outer layer, and keep the soft white fibers inside. After pounding them into fine threads, they can be used. Normally, they are kept in a medicinal solution to stay moist, and before use, they are softened with steam, making them easy to thread through a needle for stitching wounds.”
He took a roll of thread from his medicine box and handed it to Wei Lan—it was the same thread she had just used to stitch Dan’s wound. He continued, “This thread is absorbable, meaning it dissolves as the wound heals, so there’s no need to remove the stitches.”
Wei Lan’s eyes lit up. “So it’s an absorbable suture! When I stitched Brother Dan’s wound, I was worried about removing the stitches later. Turns out I didn’t need to!”
Liu Mingyi then pointed at the words “ten jars of liquor” on her list, puzzled. “Why do you need so much alcohol just to treat wounds?”
Wei Lan picked up a jar of liquor and gestured, “This is for disinfection. Pouring strong liquor over a wound prevents festering.”
“Disinfection?” Liu Mingyi frowned slightly. “Is this like how the Wushier Bingfang (Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Ailments) recommends using alcohol for dog bites? But using it for ordinary wounds seems wasteful.”
Wei Lan replied seriously, “If a wound isn’t cleaned properly, it can fester and become infected, leading to high fever or even death. Have you ever seen a wound turn red and ooze yellow fluid? That’s an infection.”
Liu Mingyi paced back and forth. “So ‘disinfection’ prevents this ‘infection.’ But you say all wounds contain toxins—are these toxins invisible to the naked eye?”
Wei Lan rubbed her temples and smiled wryly. This ancient man was a curious one, asking one question after another as if he wanted to get to the bottom of everything. How could she explain the concept of bacteria to him? If she told him that bacteria were everywhere—on people, in the air, in water—it would surely overturn his entire worldview.
Better to take it slow.
After some thought, she simplified her explanation: “Just like miasma is invisible yet causes disease, these impurities can exist in soil, water, or even the air we breathe.”
“And strong liquor can remove these… impurities?”
Wei Lan nodded. “At least 70–80% of them.”
Liu Mingyi pointed at the coiled copper tube in her diagram. “What is this curved thing for?”
Wei Lan explained, “This is a distillation apparatus. You heat ordinary alcohol, and since alcohol evaporates before water, you collect and condense the vapor to get a stronger liquor.”
“That’s just how we make shaojiu (burnt liquor),” Liu Mingyi said, pulling a book from the shelf and flipping to a section on jiulu (distilled liquor). “Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu) mentions that when clear liquor is steamed, it produces a liquid ‘as clear as water but extremely strong in taste.’”
Wei Lan took the book and was stunned. Distillation existed in the Ming Dynasty? She flipped to the page and smacked her forehead. “I just read this two days ago—how did I miss it? So ‘alcohol’ is just jiulu!”
“Madam Li has a tian guo (distillation pot) for making liquor. I’ll borrow it,” Liu Mingyi said, immediately heading out.
Watching his departing figure, Wei Lan murmured to herself, “I need to read the whole book thoroughly—no more skipping sections.”
Before long, Liu Mingyi returned carrying a large copper vessel. “Got the tian guo!” He thumped a half-man-high liquor jar onto the stove, quickly set up an iron pot, placed a grooved copper lid on top, and connected it to a winding tin pipe.
Wei Lan poked at the condensed droplets on the copper lid. “When did this thing appear?”
“The Yuan Dynasty,” Liu Mingyi said while pouring two ladles of clear liquor into the iron pot and filling the copper lid’s groove with cold well water. “Once we heat it, the alcohol vapor will condense on the lid and drip down the spout.” He pointed to a ceramic jar waiting at the end of the pipe.
The fire roared to life, and when the first drop of clear liquid fell into the jar, Wei Lan gripped the stove edge in excitement. “The Yuan Dynasty already had distillation? That’s two hundred years ahead of Europe!”
Liu Mingyi stirred the fire with tongs. “The Mongols brought the technique back during their westward conquests. Now all shaojiu is made using this method.”
Wei Lan carefully adjusted the fire. Every half an hour, she had to replace the cooling water on the copper lid. She hurried between the well and the stove with a water ladle.
“What was the alcohol content of this liquor before distillation?” she asked, wiping sweat from her forehead.
Liu Mingyi sniffed the jar. “One part alcohol to ten parts liquid.”
Wei Lan estimated: To distill from 10% alcohol to nearly pure ethanol, she’d need to repeat the process at least three or four times.
After three rounds of distillation, Liu Mingyi warned, “Drinking this jiulu directly would burn your throat. Are you sure you need something this strong?”
“It’s not for drinking,” Wei Lan said, mixing the distilled alcohol with water in a three-to-one ratio. “This is the ideal concentration for disinfection.”
Liu Mingyi asked, “Why this exact ratio?”
“It’s been tested thousands of times,” Wei Lan replied. “A solution with about 75% alcohol is most effective at killing germs—too strong, and it’s less effective; too weak, and it doesn’t work well enough.”
Seeing her confidence, Liu Mingyi made room in his medicine box for a porcelain bottle. “We’ll keep some on hand and see how well it works when treating wounds.”
Wei Lan sealed the bottle, her heart racing with excitement. She was already envisioning opening a clinic, setting up a pharmacy, and drafting plans to promote alcohol-based disinfection.
Lost in her dreams, she clutched the bottle and grinned—until Liu Mingyi’s next words doused her enthusiasm like a bucket of cold water.
“Do you know how much grain this bottle of jiulu costs?” he asked. “Making this three-ounce bottle used up three pounds of yellow wine. Since five pounds of grain produce one pound of wine, this took fifteen pounds of grain. That’s enough to feed a family of five for three days.”
Wei Lan’s hands trembled. She held half an acre’s worth of harvest in her palm. “Ordinary doctors can’t afford this, can they?”
Liu Mingyi shook his head. “Let’s divide the alcohol: 50% for tools, 70% for serious wounds, 30% for minor injuries.”
It was a practical compromise, but Wei Lan felt disheartened.
She had believed making medical alcohol would solve the disinfection problem. But the real challenge wasn’t alcohol—it was food.
In an era without high-yield crops or industrial distillation, alcohol-based disinfection was destined to be a luxury only the wealthy could afford.