Polite Dissent

Continuing my series of medical annotations of Naoki Urawawa’s excellent manga Monster.

There is barely any medicine in Monster Volume 5, but it’s my favorite volume of the series so far because of the well-realized characters within it. There is Dr. Rudi Gellen, a former classmate — really a former competitor – of Tenma during medical school. He is now a respected clinical psychologist and when Tenma ends up on his doorstep, will he help him or turn him over to the police? (He should really be a criminal psychiatrist and not a psychologist, so I wonder if that’s a translation mistake or just another appearance of a common error — confusing psychiatrists and psychologists).

Nina Fortner appears again, chasing Michael, one of the ex-cops who murdered her foster parents. Johann, Nina’s brother and the monster of the title, doesn’t appear in the book directly but does influence most of the action and underlying conspiracies. Finally, Inspector Lunge arrives and sets a trap for Tenma, but in the end he is the one who is injured.

In the first chapter of Monster Volume 6, it is up to Tenma to repair Inspector Lunge’s injuries despite the inspector’s distrust of him, not to mention the fact that he is handcuffed.

While I am usually impressed by Tenma’s medical skills, I don’t agree with his choices here. Inspector Lunge has an open abdominal wound and it would be a very bad idea to introduce contamination into the wound — contamination such as thread taken from an old cloth bag left in an abandoned warehouse. I agree that the bleeding needs to be stopped, but there are better ways Tenma could be going about it (for instance using thread pulled from his or the inspector’s clothes; or even direct pressure while driving the inspector to the hospital).

Subsequent chapters focus on Eva, Tenma’s former fiancé. It seems that she’s had her own run in with Johann and now stumbles across one of his associates while searching for Tenma.

Meanwhile, Tenma is once again operating as an “underground surgeon.” His patient this time is the number two man in a criminal organization who was injured in an assassination attempt. One bullet “grazed his skull.” The other “went clean through the leg, and the anterior tibial artery was undamaged.”

The anterior tibial artery is one of the two main arteries of the lower leg (the other, naturally, is the posterior tibial artery). It sounds like the bullet went through the front aspect of the calf. It must have done a fair amount of damage for Tenma’s surgical skills to be required, but since the bullet missed the important artery the patient should recover fully.

The final chapters concern students at the University of Munich and a mystery surrounding a wealthy recluse. It’s probably not much of a spoiler to mention that one of the students is Johann…

Previous Monster Medical Annotations:
Volume 1 (Chapter 1 - part 1, Chapter 1 - part 2, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6)
Volume 2
Volume 3 (part 1, part 2)
Volume 4