Chapter 239: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

“Pure alcohol?” August repeated. “Is she following the miasma theory—trying to cure it with pure alcohol?”

He frowned as he spoke.

“But that would make little sense. As you yourself must know, buying so much Grain for your stills is extremely expensive. Ordinary citizens could never afford such a treatment, much less use it regularly. It might serve the wealthy, perhaps—but even then it would be a dangerous gamble.”

Francisco shook his head, a sharp, almost clinical smile crossing his face. He gestured for August and Heyne to step closer to the long laboratory table where Catalina was working.

“You are thinking like a physician of the old world, August,” Francisco said, his voice lowering to an intense, thoughtful tone. “You think of alcohol as a medicine to be swallowed—a luxury for the stomach. But Catalina does not use it to cure smallpox once it has taken hold.”

He tapped the edge of the table lightly.

“She uses it to purify the threshold.”

Christian frowned, now more confused than before.

“Purify the threshold? What exactly does that mean?”

Francisco scratched the back of his neck and shrugged.

“To be honest, I do not know how to explain it properly,” he admitted. “Medicine is not my field. At this point even my little sister probably understands more about it than I do.”

He leaned against the table.

“But among the indigenous people of New Granada, it is common practice to clean their tools—and even their hands—before treating wounds or infections. Catalina believes that with smallpox there is… something that enters the body.”

He hesitated slightly, searching for the right words.

“So to reduce the risk of infection, they clean everything with alcohol before the procedure.”

Christian fell silent, thinking deeply.

“So the miasma theory may still be correct,” he murmured slowly. “Alcohol preserves organic matter very effectively. Perhaps she intends to preserve whatever substance she introduces into the body—preventing contamination of the instrument.”

Francisco laughed softly.

“I truly have no idea. Perhaps we should ask Catalina herself. After all, this is her experiment, not mine.”

He spread his hands casually.

“I merely provide the money.”

Christian shook his head with mild amusement.

“You are beginning to behave more and more like the aristocracy,” he said. “Or like those new bourgeois industrialists—funding clever minds and letting them work while you collect the results.”

Francisco looked mildly offended.

“Director, I already spend most of my time dealing with those machines,” he replied. “I barely have time to study anything else. And it’s not as if I lack money.”

He shrugged again.

“My wife enjoys experimenting with medicine. So I let her.”

Christian chuckled and shook his head.

“Very well, then. Lead us to where they are working. I suspect I have a few questions to ask… and I believe my colleague Johann does as well.”

At that moment, one of the professors stepped forward from the group.

The man moved with surprising lightness for someone of his solid build.

At forty-two years old, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach stood at the height of his intellectual powers, and his presence seemed to draw the very attention of the room toward him.

He did not resemble the fragile, pale scholars one expected to find buried in library stacks. Instead, he possessed a rounded, healthy face and a broad forehead that appeared even larger beneath his carefully powdered wig, styled in the modest fashion of Göttingen’s faculty.

His eyes—bright, restless, and filled with playful curiosity—fixed upon Francisco with the keen intensity of a naturalist examining a newly discovered species.

“You must be Francisco, correct?” Johann said, his voice carrying the warmth of a man who had spent his life in the sunlight of discovery rather than in the shadows of dogma.

“I have heard much about you—the young genius who creates rules for himself, like Goethe dictating the laws of poetry, or young Beethoven in Vienna shattering the structure of the sonata in search of a new sound.”

He stepped closer, his eyes traveling over Francisco’s frame with a clinical precision that was both flattering and deeply unsettling. He was not looking at Francisco’s clothes. He was studying the way his muscles moved, the angle of his jaw, and the spark of light in his pupils.

“You have that same Sturm und Drang in your eyes,” Johann continued, his smile widening. “Most men are merely copies of their fathers. But you… you are a prototype. A specimen of the new century.”

He raised his hand, letting it hover a few inches from Francisco’s temple, as if he were tempted to measure the circumference of his skull right then and there.

“In fact,” Johann murmured, his tone shifting from academic admiration to something almost predatory in its curiosity, “you are so unique that I feel a certain professional jealousy toward the future.”

He tilted his head thoughtfully.

“It is a pity that I will likely depart this world before you do. Because, my dear Francisco, I would gladly surrender ten years of my life for the privilege of dissecting you—once you have no further use for that magnificent head.”

Christian’s eyes widened so much they seemed capable of illuminating the entire corridor.

He coughed loudly.

“Stop—stop, Johann!” he said sharply. “You cannot go around telling people how much you look forward to dissecting their corpses. Do you want to ruin the reputation of the university—or frighten young Francisco?”

Johann simply shrugged.

“My reputation regarding corpses is already quite dreadful,” he replied calmly. “Yet people still admire me with all their hearts.”

He folded his hands behind his back.

“And it is perfectly natural to be curious about what lies inside the head of a genius. Are you not curious yourself? Whether their bones are thicker… whether the skull is larger… perhaps even whether the brain itself is different?”

Christian slapped his forehead.

“One day you are going to kill me, Professor Johann.”

Then he turned to Francisco with an apologetic expression.

“Please ignore him,” Christian said. “He is obsessed with the human body. But he is not dangerous—only… a little eccentric.”

Johann ignored the comment completely.

“Come, come, young man,” he said impatiently. “I want to hear your wife explain how she intends to confront that devilish illness that has caused so much suffering.”

He waved dismissively toward the other professors.

“These old fogies may be fascinated by the building, but I care far more about the future of the human mind—and the human body.”

Before anyone could respond, Johann seized Francisco by the arm and marched toward the staircase leading back down to the first floor.

Behind them, the directors and professors stood in stunned silence.

Then they simply shrugged and followed.

As they crossed the threshold into the first-floor laboratory, the atmosphere changed instantly.

The heavy, humid air of the bath vanished, replaced by a sharp, crisp coolness.

In the eighteenth century, most medical spaces smelled of damp wool, sawdust, and the sickly-sweet odor of festering wounds.

But here the air was dominated by something entirely different:

the clean, biting sting of high-proof alcohol and the faint mineral scent of wet Roman cement.

The room was a masterpiece of eighteenth-century industrial logic. Along the walls, the seamless gray cement had been polished until it glowed like slate under the afternoon sun. There were no wooden shelves where rot could hide; instead, Francisco had installed brass brackets and glass-fronted cabinets that held rows of crystal vials, each labeled in precise, elegant script.

Johann stopped mid-stride, his eyes darting to the center of the room.

Instead of a wooden table scarred by previous surgeries, there stood a massive slab of black marble supported by a forged iron frame. Above it, a series of convex mirrors and polished silver reflectors had been carefully positioned to catch the light from the tall windows, funneling a brilliant, shadowless beam onto the workspace.

“Good heavens,” Johann whispered, tightening his grip on Francisco’s arm. “You have not built a laboratory—you have built an altar to the sun.”

His eyes moved upward, studying the mirrors.

“Where did this concept come from? Who is your architect? And why so much light?”

Francisco shrugged.

Internally, he almost laughed. After seeing the magnificent laboratories of the future, this place felt almost modest to him. Still, he knew that following the logic of the future had rarely led him astray.

“The architect was Friedrich Gilly,” he replied. “He followed the architectural language of the ancient Greek temples. The lighting effect was my idea when we designed the structure.”

He paused.

“If you are interested, you can find him in Berlin. Though you may have to wait a little while—he is only twenty-two.”

Francisco smiled faintly.

“Still, he is already becoming quite famous. After finishing this laboratory, several wealthy men in Berlin—apparently ashamed of their own mansions—went to him asking that he design their houses.”

Blumenbach shrugged.

“What a pity,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should request a new medical building for the university. The old one is becoming painfully cramped.”

Inside the room, the contrast with the outside world was striking.

While most physicians still treated smallpox with bleeding, purging, and suffocating heat, Catalina had created a sanctuary of cold, clinical logic.

The patient was an old man. His skin was mapped with the cruel, swollen pustules of the Great Pox. Terror lingered in his eyes, but Catalina’s movements were so calm and precise that they seemed to anchor him in place.

She had already covered his nose and mouth with several layers of linen cloth soaked in a mild solution of vinegar and alcohol—a primitive but surprisingly effective filter meant to keep the “breath of the illness” from spreading through the room.

“He is in the second week,” Catalina explained without turning, her voice slightly muffled by her own protective cloth.

“The fever has already peaked. But now comes the true danger.”

She adjusted one of the instruments on the marble slab.

“The secondary infection—the putrefaction of the sores. Smallpox opens the body to the miasma, and the miasma tries to take their life.”

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