To touch on the matter of Honung.

I had quite a good time passing on my medical knowledge to Dr. Samson, but aboard the ship the most I could do was verbal transmission. We had no cadavers to dissect, no poultices to grind and test, no patients to treat. When we arrived at Hearth Bay, he nearly claimed every spare hour I had and I was lucky he had to fuss with his family for some of the days. The apothecarial store had been managed by his grandmother, the expert of the family who had taught him, and she continued to manage it without him.

She was somewhat miffed that he had found a new master to tutor under, but could hardly complain when he explained that my area of expertise was largely surgical rather than her specialty of sickness and medicine.

As it happened, the somewhat divinely educated alchemist Honung sought them out for treatment of his malady. While she prescribed him some ginger root tea on a regular basis, which would have done well were he seasick, the treatment did little for the symptoms. Dr. Samson took down his symptoms and measurements, as I had instructed him for record compilation, and came to me with the problem.

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While I had suspicions about his sobriety, the young doctor had studiously noted that Honung couldn’t hear out of one ear. We questioned him about it, and he said he’d been like that all his life. So I took a look with what tools were available to me and discovered that his ear canal was as twisted as a knot.

I shall spare the reader the bloody details, but the short of it is that we drugged him with ether and amputated his ear down to the skull, innards and all. When he recovered, he sprang out of his chair so fast the blood loss made him fall over. But, after that he was falling over himself to thank us for curing him. We took no payment, as the surgery was for educational purposes, and sent him on his way. I never did reach out to him again, because I would have had to explain that there might have been other solutions to his almost cancerous growth of cartilage disrupting the flow of fluids within him.

Of course, I only developed these medical hypotheses by examining what we carved out of him, so perhaps his suffering will benefit the next to have such a deformation. Nevertheless, it was excellent practice at the nipping and cauterizing of blood vessels, which would prove quite instrumental for his future treatment of Lucius.