성자는 개뿔, 현대의학의 힘이다

THE HOLY POWER OF MODERN MEDICINE

MANGA

STATUS
RELEASING
VOLUMES
Not Available
RELEASE
May 31, 2022
CHAPTERS
Not Available

DESCRIPTION

Jin Yoo-Sung was a gifted surgeon said to be able to bring the dead back to life. However, not even this genius doctor had the ability to revive himself. Following a fatal car crash, Yoo-Sung closed his eyes for what he'd thought was the last time… only to wake up and find that he's been reborn in a fantasy world! A doctor through and through, Yoo-Sung—now Ray—resolves to become a healer again. Unfortunately, it seems his new magical abilities may not be the most fitting for his dream career…

(Source: Tapas, edited)

CAST

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

bepiszero
45/100
(Dropped) Breezy, but vacuous. Enjoyable characters with superficial setpieces and little medicine, despite the title.
I made two attempts to read The Holy Power of Modern Medicine. In the first, I made it to chapter 6 before dropping it for its lack of, for lack of a better term, medically interesting content. Then I saw it had a fairly high average score here and was popular, so I pushed through and kind of enjoyed it until chapter 33, where I realized that this is an unserious webtoon even by the absurdly low standards of most webtoons. It's actually fairly enjoyable just as a fantasy work because the protagonist tends to keep things moving at a good pace, it just falls apart completely any time he has to actually do medicine. Which is a problem for a medical isekai with a "genius surgeon" protagonist.

Plot Spoilers Below

While there's no real point in trying to nitpick the medical treatments shown (they aren't necessarily wrong, they've just been simplified excessively), the process of medical care is skimped on and skipped past in a way that makes these setpieces that the story focuses a lot of time and effort on unsatisfying. Diagnosis happens pretty much instantly and the cause is always correct. Basic body processes like allergic histamine response are explained in a single panel and without any real detail on what histamine even does or why it's supposed to "help" when the body detects an allergen. This is not a complicated concept, especially for how widespread allergy medication (and anti-inflammatories in general) is as an over-the-counter drug.

If anything, the author seems more familiar with the travails of dieting given their strangely specific understanding of how quitting white bread/gluten can cause mild withdrawal symptoms, even to someone with eczema caused by a gluten allergy. I don't think it's a bad thing that they mentioned this being a problem (it at least added some friction to the medical process that wasn't Genius Surgeon Baek Yoosung having a crisis of confidence) but it did strike me as funny that they managed to pinpoint something this specific while giving the actual cause of the patient's allergy 1 panel of inadequate explanation.

Then the protagonist invented chess to help the patient deal with her craving for carbohydrates. And I more or less lost all faith in this webtoon at that point. This isn't about chess specifically. It's just extremely hard to believe that this society developed to this point without the concept of boardgames, especially one as basic as chess. To an extent I can rationalize the lack of detail on the medical side of things in this manga as a reaction to potential censorship or the avoidance of senstive topics (although if this is true I would ask, "why a medical webtoon", but I digress). I'm not willing to deal with the protagonist not only creating chess (cringe but whatever), but it also turning everyone (everyone) into a chess addict. This was meant to help someone avoid carb cravings by the way. I'm not asking the webtoon to give out diet advice or anything (There's so many alternatives to gluten bread! Buckwheat! Millet! Certain types of Sourdough! It's a fantasy world just give them potatoes!) but is this really how you want to treat your story? It's not particularly out of character for webtoons to pull this kind of zany move for humor but my suspension of disbelief has to be at least thinly justified. I really don't require that much. Seriously, I read some proper trash. But at least they're less cavalier with their main topic than The Holy Power of Modern Medicine.

One thing I will shout out though is that the supporting cast are all quite good, even minor characters with bit parts like the Intelligence Guild and Ray's parents. Ray's mom owns. It really does feel like a skilled webtoon author writing out of their depth because their webtoon had to be about something and they wanted to pick something popular, without bothering to either learn about it or copy another source (a time tested tradition in webtoons, and I don't blame them considering the schedules those guys are put on). The overall plot is never anything substantial but I generally liked every named character, which is a rarity for most things I read, nevermind webtoons.

Score

I operate on a 5 star scoring system, and gave The Holy Power of Modern Medicine a 2/5. This would be 40 on the percentile scale, and I went with 45 because it's probably fine if you don't get deathly offended by a webtoon that doesn't care about its topic much and falls into insipid isekai tropes like inventing the concept of a boardgame in an early modern society advanced enough to fabricate full plate armor.
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