Struggle in the Steam Age

Since there are few professional medical personnel in this world, Lawrence can't expect that there will be many real regular doctors in his place. Fortunately, he had read a "Barefoot Doctor's Manual" from his grandfather before crossing, so he decided to follow the method in that manual to train a group of barefoot doctors belonging to the island.

Lawrence also knows that the medical personnel trained in this way have relatively low knowledge of medicine and pathology because they have not received systematic learning, and they cannot treat serious and serious diseases, let alone complicated diseases. At best, it can cure common diseases, reduce infant mortality during childbirth and prevent large-scale outbreaks of infectious diseases.

But that's good compared to the almost zero healthcare system in the region right now. After all, the overall level of development of the world lies here, even in cities there is an extreme shortage of medical experts. So if you want to build a medical system, you must take some local measures.

Therefore, besides the immigrants, among the young people receiving training in the hospital, there are also many aborigines on the island, and the methods donated by these aborigines about the methods of using local herbal medicines passed down from generation to generation are also very helpful to Lawrence and the others. The establishment of the medical system here has provided a huge help.

These prescriptions do have a series of problems, such as the overall fragmentation and fragmentation, and some of the prescriptions themselves are fake or have serious side effects. However, if effective screening is carried out, several useful prescriptions can always be summed up.

After all, this place is far away from those industrial centers, and all kinds of drugs used by doctors in the past are difficult to obtain. Therefore, these herbs can also make up for the deficiency of drugs to a large extent.

In addition, most drugs in this era are not as extremely industrialized as Lawrence was in his previous life. So Lawrence also established a small pharmaceutical workshop on the island to produce some needed medicines.

Of course, it is impossible to produce complex pharmaceuticals under such a production environment. It can only produce some alcohol for disinfection and a few medicines with relatively low production thresholds. However, Lawrence, as a spellcaster, would come here whenever he had time and try to analyze the active ingredients in these local herbs by crushing, distilling and other means.

Recently, he has made a breakthrough in this area: he got some white powder when extracting the bark of a certain tree used by local people to relieve pain. After many experiments, Lawrence found that this should be the natural anti-inflammatory drug salicylic acid.

It's just that this kind of thing is corrosive to the human body, so Lawrence just uses it as a kind of technical reserve for small-scale experiments in the hospital, and records the results of the experiment in the file. For his part, he doesn't plan to release the drug until a safer product, aspirin, is made.

In short, although the territory on the island can be said to be a waste of time. But under the command of Lawrence, the whole development has entered the right track. If everything goes well, the island will develop little by little.

However, various things in the world are often not as smooth as people imagined. Just when Lawrence was preparing to nest on the island to farm and slowly develop . The telegram only notified one thing, and that was to tell the surrounding islands that they had found traces of pirates.

Because this sea area is the closest to the Elysion Empire, the Imperial Navy will often send out long-distance patrols to patrol this area. However, because of the distance from the base, the Elysion Empire Navy generally only attacked the hostile targets that they could guarantee to destroy in this area, and often avoided those relatively large enemies.

So after discovering the whereabouts of the pirates this time, the navy's two heavy frigates took the initiative to break away from contact with each other in order to protect the ship as usual. For the sake of some rules, when they stay away from this area, they also send an alarm to all surrounding settlements at the same time.

For Lawrence, there are pirate activities around is a very troublesome thing, because it means that he needs to gather some people who are building on the island to enter the port area for defense.

Although there are a lot of landing places on this island, it is too troublesome for a large pirate force to go through the vast tropical rainforest, and it is easy to cause non-combat attrition. Therefore, pirates often only attack those coastal settlements, so Lawrence can also judge the pirate's landing point in advance and carry out targeted defenses.

Fortunately for Lawrence, the coastal defense fort at the entrance of the port has almost been built, and the artillery and mines have also been placed in place, leaving only the last bit of finishing work on the periphery. With this fortress, the island can avoid the possibility of the opponent directly bombarding the port after rushing into the bay to the greatest possible extent.

But just waiting for the pirates to come to the island seemed a bit too passive, so Lawrence began to collect information about these pirates. After synthesizing the information sent by his neighbors, he roughly determined the general situation of the pirates appearing in this sea area now.

According to the pirate situation described in the warning telegram by the Elysion Empire Navy, especially the flags flying on the pirate flagship and the ship types of several ships in the fleet. The surrounding neighbors can basically confirm that the group of pirates they encountered was the Killing Fog pirate group that had been active nearby for the past five or six years.

According to the records of the neighbors in previous years and the observation of the Elysion Empire Navy, this pirate group now has five pirate ships. Among them, the flagship Torch and the other ship are all steam sailing ships with six to eight doors and rear-mounted artillery of more than 100mm, while the other three are old-fashioned sailing ships with a deadweight tonnage of about 200 to 250 tons. guns as weapons. The only role in the pirate group is to attack old-fashioned merchant ships and transport soldiers.

However, unlike when they came over the previous year, this year's pirate ship group only had five ships left. A 300-ton clipper has disappeared, and other ships have been patched. So they should have taken refuge in these places far away from the mainland after the defeat of the navy this year, and by the way, robbed around to boost morale again.

According to the account of a certain island owner who had fought against these pirates before, the leader of these pirates was an expert black priest who used to serve the Sea God. But later, after being discovered because of piracy, he killed the members of the Sea God Guard who came to arrest him and became a black priest.

A silver-level spellcaster is already troublesome enough, but what is even more troublesome is that he should have a magic item in his hand that can make the surrounding environment fog up. The pirate group used the fog generated by such magic props as a cover to complete their raids many times.

But no one knows what this magic item that can generate fog looks like, because the captain of the pirate group kept this secret very well, and even the crew on the ship didn't know it. According to intelligence, some pirates once tried to peek at this secret while casting a spell, but were directly beheaded by the captain. Since then, no one on board dared to peep and cast spells.

Although this kind of fog is just ordinary fog, it is easy for the caster to lock the enemy's position through the fog. But the sparsely populated small island in this sea area doesn't even have many extraordinary people, let alone spellcasters who are relatively rare among extraordinary people.

For example, on the island of Nicosia, there is only one spellcaster in the surrounding area, which is a place with relatively strong supernatural power, while more islands have only a few supernatural warriors or magic gunners. The situation of a group of spellcasters on the island like Lawrence is very abnormal. Also because of this advantage, Lawrence didn't worry much about the possible attacks of the pirates.

"We should take the initiative to attack." This was the tone that Lawrence set for the next plan when he gathered the personnel for a meeting. Although he was not afraid of the enemy's attack, it was not a good thing for a group of pirates to wander around.

More importantly, among the merchant ships sailing in this sea area recently, the most valuable ships should be the ships that deliver supplies to New Sor Island. All obstacles made Lawrence unacceptable.

"Of course it's a good thing to take the initiative." Knight Joseph, who was in charge of the military, nodded in support first, and then asked an important question. "But what do we do next and how do we attack next?"