Ling Ran operated on a patient after dinner. He then headed home in a leisurely manner.
At that point, only 120 beds were assigned to him. However, he could also occupy some hospital beds that belonged to other treatment groups or other departments such as the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery. So, he actually had access to around 150 hospital beds. If he were to emulate other hospitals and only keep patients for a short time, he was supposed to have enough hospital beds to go around.
However, most of the surgical methods Ling Ran carried out did not allow the patients to stay in the hospital for a mere fifteen days.
Take hepatectomy, finger replantation surgery, and Achilles tendon repair as examples. For optimal recovery, they had to invest a lot of time in the patients. It was normal for those patients to stay in the hospital for a total of twenty days or even thirty days.
Translator’s notes:
[1] Kong Yiji is a short story by Lu Xun, the founder of modern Chinese literature. (Source: Wikipedia)