The Ghost-Doctor

In the days of the Dali reign a great plague swept the south of the river, and of ten households nine stood empty. There was a town called Clear Creek, where the dead lay piled upon one another; the priests and shamans were at their wits’ end, and the sound of weeping rose without cease, day and night. Then a physician came in the night—white-robed, carrying a satchel, his name unspoken. He entered the houses of the sick, lit moxa and plied the needle, and wherever he went the sufferer mended. When men asked his name he only said, “I but ply the needle; of what use is a name?” From dusk to dawn he walked the whole town through, never resting his feet. A young man followed behind him and saw that where the needle fell, a black vapour issued from the seven openings of the sick and dissolved into green smoke. Struck with wonder, the youth asked, “Sir, what art is this?” The physician turned—his face white as paper, his eyes without pupils—and said, “Thirty years ago, when Clear Creek knew the plague, I obeyed my mother and practised as a physician. When the medicines were spent, I opened my own breast and took forth the cinnabar to give men life, and so I died. Now the pestilence has risen again, and my soul still clings to the people of this place; therefore I have come.” Even as he spoke, the sky suddenly brightened and the cock crowed thrice; the physician’s form grew faint, and he stood unmoving beneath the old locust at the lane’s mouth. The youth hastened to look, and there beneath the locust was a gravestone, its moss worn and mottled, engraved: “Tomb of Wang Puzhi, physician of Clear Creek, who perished in the former plague of the Dali reign.” Then he understood that the needle-wielder of the night had been a ghost. The villagers gathered to honour him, and the plague soon abated. The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: In life he opened his breast to give men life; in death his soul returned to heal the pestilence. Among the living there are those who grudge a single dose; this ghost, though, spent his whole heart. Shall the soul of a healer decay with his bones?