The instant noodle packaging bag was folded into a crumpled quadruple fold, and the uncle shook his hand to take out the medicine fee, and his eyes were buried in the layers of wrinkles. Zhu Laicheng put his hand on the abacus, the little finger silently returned the hook, and several abacus beads quietly slid to the bottom frame.
This is a habit inherited from his father Zhu Xiulin - no medical fees, and when conditions are difficult, they will deliberately underestimate the cost of medicine, and even build a little bit of it themselves. From the "barefoot doctor" to the mountain village clinic, in 57 years, the "dead account" in the hands of father and son has accumulated 7 large books.
In The West Village of Miyun River in Beijing, the mountain touched the nose, and the Tide River was squeezed to the west and turned around a bend, and then flowed south. Late at night, the egret rests on the big pine tree by the river, and the bright white light of the village clinic rolls over the window ledge, leaving creases on the big willow tree at the door, like a staircase paved with frost and snow.
Shacks, compartments, warehouses... At first, the small clinic kept changing locations until 1993, when it took root in its current location. At that time, Zhu Xiulin was in his prime, and specially picked two willow trees with straight trunks and planted them at the door. Over the years, the shade of the trees has gradually become what the clinic is today - in the 60 square meters of space, the consultation room, treatment room, and pharmacy are well organized, and the villagers can complete a medical treatment between turns.
Beijing Miyun Hexi Village, the rural clinic of the Zhu family father and son. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
Just like a cycle, two generations of village doctors, father and son, both practicing medicine at the age of 25, carrying medicine boxes, running in the fields, relaying the health of villagers within a radius of 6 kilometers. Time is like a knife, the father is gone, and the son's son is also in the ear and eye, embarking on the road of learning medicine.
Three years ago, after a minor hardware upgrade, the clinic added four more skylights. Between visits, Zhu Laicheng looked up and could see the willow branches swinging lightly outside the window. Moving the abacus that his father had spent most of his life, he felt at peace in his heart, "Every doctor must grind out the patience of his lover." ”
The "Barefoot Doctor" in the Mountains
Zhu Xiulin's work as a doctor is more like a coincidence.
In 1963, after graduating from high school, he returned to the village. Spring ploughing and autumn fruit, dragging a rake to support the plough, the young man guarded an acre and a third of the land, relying on a handful of strength to support his family.
At that time, the lack of medical care and medicine was very common in rural areas. Large communes may have health centers, small communes do not even have clinics, and it is luck to be able to occupy an old Chinese medicine doctor. In Zhu Xiulin's life, the word "doctor" will hardly roll on the tip of his tongue, and he never thought that just two years later, it would become his new identity and accompany him for life.
In September 1965, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China approved the "Report on Placing The Focus of Health on the Rural Areas" of the former Party Group of the Ministry of Health, and the rural doctors who were also farmers and doctors began to blossom in rural areas. As one of the few high school students in Gubeikou Town, Zhu Xiulin, who was 25 years old at the time, became the only candidate for the village doctor of the Hexi Village Brigade.
In order to cultivate these rural grassroots medical forces, the town invited experts from Peking University. Zhu Xiulin carried his bag and walked 40 miles along the river loop to reach the teaching point. In the first year, he lived there, concentrating on his studies and not giving others a look; In the next three years, I had more time to go back to the village, and I learned to use any medicine directly, and I could even toss it back and forth a day.
Wearing a straw hat and carrying a medicine box, he walked through the fields — for the next 20 years, he was more affectionately called "barefoot doctor" by the villagers like countless peers he had never met.
At that time, there were 10 production teams in Hexi Village, two of which were in the ravine and needed to go to the clinic regularly. Every week, Zhu Xiulin would follow the path cut by the villagers to cut firewood and climb into the mountains to give people a look at the disease.
Crouching Tiger Mountain behind Hexi Village is one of the mountains that Zhu Xiulin often crosses during his rounds. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
"Dr. Zhu!" Seeing him coming, the villagers, who were still busy in the crop fields, hurried to greet him. Not so exquisite, they gathered on the edge of the ground, opened their sweatshirts that were too sweaty and mud to see the true color, waiting for Zhu Xiulin to squat down and put the stethoscope on his chest.
The dirt road is bumpy, Zhu Xiulin's feet are fast, and all the way to the coyote smoke. Sometimes, in order to save time and cut corners, Zhu Xiulin climbed directly from a village of more than 200 meters above sea level to The 660-meter-high Wohu Mountain. The mountain is steep and dangerous, and he walks a lot, but he has practiced a few points of ability to walk on the ground - often, he goes out to visit the clinic in the morning, and in the evening, he can carry 180 pounds of firewood home to cook.
One person has to take care of the life, old age, illness and death of more than 3,000 people in Hexi Village. Almost everyone in the village knocked on his door late at night.
Knocks on the door at night are all emergencies. As soon as there was a knock on the door, the whole family was basically awakened, and if they were more anxious, they would turn into the courtyard and knock on the window glass. In the winter, Zhu Xiulin draped a cotton jacket, wore a fleece hat, and carried the outpatient box to the patient's home.
Adhering to the principle of "spending less money and curing serious diseases" in that era, Zhu Xiulin became a doctor and an accountant and set up a "soil pharmacy".
When he was empty, he took about a dozen elementary school apprentices and carried sacks up the mountain to collect herbs. Zhimu, Yuanzhi, Windproof, Poria... When there were no patients, he took a knife in the clinic to cut the herbs, and when it was dry, he would stomp on the medicine mill and "purr" the medicine.
The medicine mill sounded year after year, and the father's bending over and his legs stretched out and bent were also engraved into the childhood memories of his son Zhu Laicheng - his father originally liked to play chess and write calligraphy, but later, he was crowded out by medical treatment and prescriptions, leaving only a hobby of farming. The father became a man who was "chained" to him.
Zhu Xiulin's prescription notes in 2004 were already yellowed. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
In Zhu Laicheng's view at that time, his father could see any illness. The midwife could not pick up the child, so she quickly called him over; The old man and child with facial paralysis, with a few stitches, the face is normal; Someone drank the pesticide by mistake, and he was also bold enough to pick up the water pipe and wash his stomach.
Zhu Laicheng still clearly remembers that once, his father met an acquaintance at the small gate of the village. The man slipped a few doses of soup medicine, saying that he had to go home to recuperate after a cold, and asked in passing, "What do you say about me, now it is difficult to open your mouth." ”
"Did you touch it anywhere?" The father became serious, and looked at the wound wrapped in cloth with the other point, "Go fast, you have tetanus!" ”
As the father expected, the man arrived at the hospital and was diagnosed with tetanus. The disease could not see the light, and he lay in a small dark room for more than 20 days before he recovered a life.
"Medicine is an art"
Embarking on the road of practicing medicine, Zhu Laicheng said that there is both reverence for his father and love for medicine.
When he was a child, he followed his father out of the house and listened to the villagers along the way greeting his father with "second uncle, second uncle", and there was affection between his words. He often turned over his father's books, and with the knowledge that he "stole" from the color map, he dragged his friends up the mountain to plan the medicine, dug "gun bullets" on the Great Wall of Gubeikou halfway, packed a small bag back to the village to find a buying group, and could sell it for thirty or fifty cents.
After graduating from junior high school, Zhu Laicheng went to work as a bricklayer on the construction site. There were twenty or thirty people living in the simple large board room, and the workers were noisily arguing about the plot of the martial arts novel, but he was reading medical books with a flashlight in the bed. The workers laughed at him as a "nerd", and he didn't care, playing a haha.
The two books that looked up and down on the pages were the most advanced guide books of the "barefoot doctors" at that time, which were published in 1982. After Zhu Xiulin finished reading, he saw that his son was interested, so he gave him "laying the foundation". Starting with human anatomy, internal medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, and surgery are all involved, and the main points in it are "almost ready to use."
The textbook of Chinese Barefoot Doctors, which was rummaged by Zhu Xiulin and Zhu Laicheng in 1982. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
After a few years of wandering outside, Zhu Laicheng went from bricklayer to foreman, but the money earned from part-time work bought various medical books. Work and interest are like two parallel lines, and they can't be kneaded into one.
Looking back now, in fact, in the long road of life, the most important point is often those few steps. In 1990, Zhu Laicheng, who had a foundation in medicine and was also interested, chose to return to his hometown and embarked on the road of practicing medicine. He was 25 years old that year, which happened to be the age when his father turned to a village doctor.
The trajectory of the two generations of father and son has subtly "merged" across time and space, but the general environment at this time has long been changed - the rural cooperative medical system has undergone nearly 40 years of development, and the more standardized and systematic "new agricultural cooperation" has entered the exploration stage. Zhu Laicheng, who was halfway out of the family, was admitted to the health school, won the village doctor certificate and the doctor's qualification certificate, and became a "serious eight hundred" doctor of integrated Traditional Chinese and Western medicine.
The certificate is only a thin piece of paper, and years of experience are the most valuable assets of doctors.
Zhu Xiulin will use the most vivid metaphor to make his son remember the key: the crackle is like a small straw blowing water, which is typical pneumonia; The sound of large straws blowing water is more likely to be emphysema and tracheitis; The "rustling" sound of twisting hair in the ear is the sound of pleural rubbing, it may be a hydrocele in the chest cavity...
In the eyes of the fledgling Zhu Laicheng, his father was like a healer in the ancient books, gentle and elegant, and whispered softly. Studying with his father, he would feel calmed down.
Once, Zhu Xiulin asked Zhu Laicheng to show the mother of a villager about her illness. The old lady had been lying in bed because of a cerebral infarction and had bedsores on her body. Zhu Laicheng took a scalpel and "removed the pressure sores from the bone slits."
After the operation, Zhu Laicheng propped up a bed next to the old lady, turned her over every half an hour, and gave her injections on time according to the treatment plan, so she stayed for a week. New tissue replaced necrotic cells, wounds healed into scars, and the old lady's condition improved significantly.
This is cooperative. There are also many people who do not cooperate.
Some elderly people are afraid of hospitalization, afraid of spending money, afraid of delaying children, even if 120 is called, they are not willing to get on the car. Once, the half-dead old man would only shout loudly because of his aphasia. Zhu Laicheng and the old man "played five back and forth Tai Chi", soft words of comfort, but also promised "it is okay we will come back again, I will go to your house to give you infusions, do not need you to run", and finally coaxed the old man into the car.
"Medicine is an art." Zhu Laicheng said that his father slowly taught him this truth - everyone's personality is different, as a doctor, you must think through how to use language to relieve their mental tension, and then heal physical pain. A whole set of processes go down, explain things clearly, and people are not anxious. "Seeing a doctor is an art, life is also an art, this is the doctor who heals the person."
"Home Handover"
Father and son have cooperated with the sick for many years, and the tacit understanding has been infiltrated by every visit. Gradually, one grew old, one took over the baton, and unconsciously, completed the "home handover" of this rural clinic.
In August 2022, Zhu Laicheng gave pulse and blood pressure to the elderly in the village at the clinic. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
A two-eight-bar bicycle that has been on the age is one of the "witnesses".
In the early 70s of the last century, the village assigned Zhu Xiulin this bicycle and went out to get medicine, which became much more convenient. At that time, he often went out at dawn in the morning, and if he was successful, he could come back in time for lunch.
Distressed by his father's tossing, Zhu Laicheng became a village doctor and took over the work of taking medicine. There were two boxes of medicines tied to the back seat of the car, and there was ice hidden under the snow for three or nine days, and he fell on all fours without paying attention. Another time when I went out to see a doctor, I ran into a retrograde person when I turned a corner, and a large piece of the skin on his hand was torn off. Back at the clinic, he took the medicine box and set off again.
In fact, even this clinic is a little bit formed, and a little bit into the current appearance.
When he was young, Zhu Xiulin lit a kerosene lamp in a shack near the hillside of the village; Later, it was moved to a low box like a rabbit's nest, and the cat could only enter the big slope by waist. In the years that followed, the hospitals after the retreat of the railroad soldiers, the warehouses where the production teams were armed with grain, and the clinics were briefly settled. Until 1993, when Zhang Yushan, the old branch secretary, was appointed, the clinic had a fixed location.
Father and son guard the mountain village, and also receive the small but simple gratitude of the villagers. From time to time, in the middle of the night, there was a "bar" in the yard, that is, some villagers skimmed the fish they caught along the edge of the wall. Whether it is the newly cultivated cabbage in the field, or the apricots and raspberries in season, the villagers pick a big pocket and put it in front of the Zhu family, and they don't say who sent it.
There used to be a skillful blacksmith in the village, who learned that the clinic had been thief, and took the initiative to help them open a fine lock, which could not be pried open. On a rainy day, the mud dot of the eaves next door hit the window of the clinic's low bungalow, and the 80-year-old blacksmith watched, and did not squeak, and the next day he carried the guy Shi Er over, and the commander climbed on the roof to build a cornice to block the water.
Three years ago, Zhu Laicheng renovated the old clinic: the room was widened to 60 square meters, and four skylights were designed. Sitting in the examination room and looking up, he could see the willow trees that his father had planted when he was young. The willow tree was straight and straight, and light and shadow spilled through the skylight in the white clinic.
My father had been gone for 16 years, and a year before he died, he was still prescribing prescriptions and grabbing medicines.
At that time, Zhu Laicheng often advised his father that his children had already established a family, and that the clinic had also taken care of himself, so that he could rest more and hang out with his granddaughter more. But Zhu Xiulin did not do it. When he was finally admitted to the hospital, the doctor gave Zhu Laicheng a number: up to three days. Zhu Laicheng cried bitterly, of the four brothers and sisters, he lived with his father for the longest time.
Zhu Laicheng is stored in the mobile phone, and he retakes a photo of his father Zhu Xiulin before his death. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
"Don't worry." After a lifetime of being a doctor, how could Zhu Xiulin not know his own condition, he comforted his son who also knew it. Because of his serious illness, his blood vessels were thin and brittle, and the nurse tried several times with the needle without success, Zhu Laicheng applied with the head nurse to give his father a needle.
In 2006, Zhu Xiulin died. Before leaving, Zhu Laicheng hugged him and sat for the night. For a lifetime, 66 years, my father worked as a village doctor for 40 years.
By the time Zhang Yushan, the old branch secretary, returned to the village, the teacher who had taken them up the mountain to find herbs was no longer there. "I gave people a good look at my own illness, but I didn't take a good look at my own illness." He said something strange in his mouth, but his eyes were red.
In Zhu Laicheng's heart, there is a regret that can no longer be filled in - the family has never had time to take a family portrait.
But the father didn't seem to be far away. The abacus that he used for most of his life, Zhu Laicheng is still using it today; The medicine cabinet, which was the same age as Zhu Laicheng, still had a place in the clinic.
Although some of the patients who owed the "death debt" had already died, Zhu Laicheng still kept the few yellowed prescription notes because they had his father's handwriting on them.
"Every doctor has to grind out the patience of his lover"
Time is submerged in the wheels of life, opening another cycle without pause. In his hometown, Zhu Laicheng became more and more like his father, with eyebrows, expressions, and even voices.
The mountains are quiet. The village street lights turned off early, and the cement pavement pulled out a vague pale shadow, only his clinic and the small shop next door carried the lights. When there are few patients, he studies in the clinic. Every year, the government would record a lesson for the village doctor, and he held up his mobile phone to his ear and wrote down the knowledge points in a small book with his other hand.
On the evening of August 9, 2022, Zhu Laicheng listened to lectures and took notes in the pharmacy. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
Like my father, I never went out to consult in the morning and midnight. When the moonlight was shining on a sunny day, he could find the patient's door by touching the darkness. Which family in the village has high blood pressure and diabetes, Zhu Laicheng is clear in his heart.
Half of the villagers who come and go on a daily basis are from other villages, and many of them come to Beijing from Hebei to find him for infusions. Zhao Liguo's home is 30 miles away from Hexi Village. From his mother to his children, as soon as he was uncomfortable, he came to Beijing to see the Zhu family, from Zhu Xiulin to Zhu Laicheng.
Looking at the child's tongue, listening to the lung sounds, and then letting the child turn his back to knock on the rib gap, Zhu Laicheng basically knew that it was a small cold, "Take some medicine, it doesn't matter." "There have always been doctors in his village, and Zhao Liguo also knows that the medicines he hangs are the same," came to figure out a solid heart. ”
For so many years, the farthest place Zhu Laicheng went was Hefei, and that was the only time he had flown so far. In the morning, I sent my daughter from college to Hefei and took a night's car back to Beijing at night. The daughter wanted to keep her father for an extra day, but his cell phone kept ringing. The father walked briskly with "anxiety visible to the naked eye."
The absent person in the photo changed from Zhu Xiulin to Zhu Laicheng. Daughter Zhu Yuanyuan got married and went on vacation in Bali, asking her mother to do ideological work for her father a month in advance. When it came or not, Zhu Laicheng stayed in the village alone. Later, Zhu Yuanyuan forcibly pulled him out to play, booked hotels in advance, bought tickets, and "did not go to no", which occasionally pulled him to the cities around Beijing.
In the affairs of the clinic, Zhu Laicheng arranged everywhere properly, but he did not arrange a rest day for himself. Once in the New Year, catching up with the momentum, there were many patients. From Chinese New Year's Eve to the first day of the first year, the owner's child peed, pulled his arm, and dislocated; The old father of the West family got a hernia, curled his legs, inhaled and pushed for more than half an hour; There was also a coronary heart disease offender who came up, and his heart beat only 38 times a minute, and he quickly ran to get an injection to rescue him. When I got home from my busy work, I saw that it was almost six o'clock in the morning.
He also continued his father's habit of not charging for medical treatment, and even put a little in. Some compatriots came to Zhu Laicheng with instant noodle packaging bags, wrinkled and folded into four folds, the innermost part of the medicine, shaking hands to pull out.
On August 13, 2022, a villager paid for the previously unpaid medicine from a bag of instant noodles. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
With his hand on the abacus, Zhu Laicheng would deliberately give them less medicine money. In case of an emergency, he would toss home and take a thousand children and eight hundred yuan to bring his fellow villagers to see a doctor.
Over the years, the father and son have accumulated 7 "dead accounts", stacked up to 10 centimeters thick. Zhu Laicheng did not count, "It is estimated that there are more than ten thousand yuan in it." As for how much money can be converted into the current purchasing power, he has never thought about it.
This is also the most important lesson he learned from his father, "Every doctor must hone the patience of his lover." ”
It is a village doctor and a farmer
The obsession with medicine inherited from his father is now "planted" in Zhu Laicheng's son Zhu Yan.
Zhu Laicheng (center) with lover and son. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
Zhu Laicheng still remembers that when Zhu Yan was in elementary school, he ran to the clinic with his school bag and sat down as soon as he finished school. At that time, the people working outside were cut by nails and had to be debridement and disinfected before being sent to the hospital. He squatted there to give medicine to others, and Zhu Yan, who was not a little bigger, stood next to him and craned his neck to watch.
The villagers who saw the doctor felt fresh, and such a small doll was not afraid of wounds and blood, and often quipped to him, "You are afraid that you will have to pick up your father's class in the future." ”
Young Zhu Yan admired his father's skills and realm, just as his father once admired his grandfather. This difficult and complex discipline, like a bond, binds the three grandchildren together. The first medical book That Zhu Yan got was handed down from his grandfather, and the strange characters and traditional characters on it filled him with confusion, but he just couldn't help but like to think about it.
Later, when I really studied medicine and did the first mouse dissection experiment, Zhu Yan let his classmates record a video of himself taking liver tissue and sent it to his father. He also received a rare praise from his father: his hands did not shake at all, and he had the talent to be a surgeon.
When sharing treatment experiences with each other, father and son also quarrel. Obviously, the drugs that both people say are effective, that is, they have to fight for half a day. Zhu Laicheng seems to have a taut face, but in fact, his heart is more relieved - the way his son is working hard, like his own self who was talking to his father back then.
This year is already the fourth year of Zhu Yan's medical studies. During the internship, I examined the body of a pneumoconiosis patient for the first time, did chest percussion, and listened to the sound of the intercostal space. The uncle in his 60s was weak and weak in speech, and Zhu Yan was even more nervous and sweaty when he saw it.
Uncle had been encouraging him. At the end of the diagnosis and treatment, Zhu Yan specially thanked the uncle. The old man narrowed his eyes and smiled, "Don't be nervous, you have just started, and you will definitely become a good doctor in the future." ”
This comfort and praise made him more understanding of the persistence of his father and grandfather. Perhaps it is the mutual and small companionship between these people that makes young doctors choose to continue on this endless road of learning.
Guarding the mountain village clinic, Zhu Laicheng's life is still trivial and busy. Hospitals kept sending him invitations, and some even talked to him several times about whether to join or not. But he always said that it was the duty of a peasant to get used to it in the countryside and that the land could not be abandoned.
Taking care of the vegetable garden in the morning is the most relaxing moment of Zhu Laicheng's day. Chayote, mountain grapes, lentils, pink lotus, okra, cauliflower, cabbage... The family's vegetable garden is full of plants, and there are three kinds of peppers alone. Sprinkle a handful of seeds on which horn you go, take good care of them according to the seasons, and finally reap the fruit.
On August 12, 2022, Zhu Laicheng left his own land at home to hoe the ground and pick wild vegetables. Beijing News reporter Sun Linjing photographed
But as soon as the granddaughter came steadily, the vegetable field was "damaged.". The little girl took a hoe to compare the painting, and often took out the radish cabbage. Zhu Laicheng did not care, laughing and letting her "bully".
Steady more than four years old, every time she goes to the village to pestering her grandfather to climb the mountain, she can't go far, so the monkey listens to the lecture in her grandfather's arms and back: this is a sour date, that is Ou Li; On the rock jumped a squirrel, and out of it was a pheasant; Chai Hu bloomed with small yellow flowers in the shape of an umbrella, and the dragon crawled around the tree... When I returned home, I could tell my mother Zhu Yuanyuan what kind of herbs could cure.
From her daughter, Zhu Yuanyuan felt her father's attachment to the land. In recent years, she has become more and more accustomed to "following the wishes of her parents", and when she sees rare rapeseed, she buys them and mails them, "What kind of seeds can be planted in their hands." ”
The land treated Zhu Laicheng, who was working hard, fairly, just as he did with his father. At 7:00 a.m., Zhu Laicheng sorted out the vegetable patch, and the cucumber top flowers he had just picked were prickly, and he carried a bucket home. Take a shower and a new day begins.
Zhu Laicheng rode on a small battery car, followed the wind that blew through the clouds, and drove towards the clinic under the willow branch.
Beijing News reporter Guo Yimeng intern Cui Jian
Edited by Li Binbin Proofreader Jia Ning