The Year 3000 | ✔️

Chapter 8

Trip to Igeia. - The statue raised to the most illustrious doctors of antiquity. - The antechamber of the sick. - The sections of the Igeia. - The visit to a tuberculosis made by a pulmonologist. - The card stock of the year 3000. - Department of the Igei. - Visit to newborn children. - Suppression of a child. - A mother, pitiful and cruel in one

Paul woke Maria, who was still asleep, tired of a long walk made the day before, telling her:

- Have patience and get up right away, because the Director of Igeia has given me an appointment for this morning, to see the great institute of health, where the sick or wounded are healed, who need urgent care.

Maria did not get prayed twice and in half an hour she was dressed and ready for the combined trip.

With a short walk they climbed a hill in the most pleasant and charming position of Andropoli and where the large building of Igeia rises up gigantic and majestic. All around, trees that are always green with conifers from Japan and China, which make a cool shadow and spread a nice resin aroma all around. Below those plants you can see many wooden benches, where the convalescents sit.

Entering through the main door they found themselves in a large courtyard, all populated by statues of marble and bronze, which rise among flower-scented flower beds.

In the center there are three statues, those of the three great founders of ancient medicine.

- See, Mary, this is Hippocrates, a Greek physician, who lived four centuries before Christ and who was for many years the father of ancient medicine. He has left us the largest encyclopedia of medical science ever written by one man. In his books truths are found, which are true even today.

This other is Avicenna, an Arab doctor, to whom this statue was raised, not because of the cumbersome polypharmacy compilation of a thousand recipes, but because he wrote that medicine is the art of preserving health ; thus prophesying what would be the medical art many centuries after him.

This one is Galen, also a Greek physician, but who exercised his art in Rome. He laid the first stone for human anatomy, deducing it from that of the monkey, since the cutting of the human body was not permitted in his time. In addition to his glory, he had medicine and surgery made giant steps.

All around you see more than fifty other statues, all raised to convey to the posterity the memory of illustrious doctors; nor will I indicate them all to you, because I should make you the history of all medical art, in its many branches. I just want us to stop before the greatest of them.

This is Jenner, who with the discovery of vaccine pus and vaccination, prepared that of Pasteur, who lived and died in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, and who extended the vaccine to anthrax, to hydrophobia, opening a new êra to art curative. And as you see, his statue was placed very reasonably next to that of Jenner.

Immediately after the statue of the Pasteur, you see that of the Lister, who with his antiseptic treatment saved millions of victims, making possible the most daring surgical operations, and almost all harmless.

This other statue is raised to Dr. Micali, an Italian doctor, who in the XXV century, by perfecting the light Röntgen succeeded in rendering all the human body transparent, thus allowing to see with the naked eye the brain, the lungs, the heart; all the viscera and even the bone marrow.

After this discovery, the pleximeter, the stethoscope and all the other ingenious instruments were useless, with which the deep alterations of our internal organs were sought from the nineteenth century to the twenty-fifth.