nursing baby cel

Black Jack, OVA
Episode five
Unmarked
Matching production background

small nursing baby screencap

This cel comes from one of my favorite storylines from this show. Several years ago a war breaks out in a small country. A young medical student is studying abroad and races back to his home country. When he arrives he tries to help the people in his village survive the govenment onslaught. Unfortunately his skills are very limited, and he is only able to do so much. One day a mother and child are both shot at the front entrance of his hidden medical facility. The girl is already dead, and the woman nearly so. He bandages the mother as best he can, but he knows she will not make it. Just as he finishes with her, a baby is rushed in. The baby is gravely wounded. He does not think he can save it either. He wraps the wounds and lays it next to the dying woman. Suddenly he is called back and finds the baby being nursed by the woman, even though her deceased daughter was beyond the age for nursing. The woman dies shortly afterwards, and he suddenly feels moved to try more to save the baby. He takes tissue from the dead woman to replace the damaged skin, blood vessels and organs of the baby. He later reports that it felt as if someone else was doing the surgery since it was far beyond his skill level. The baby survives and amazingly does not reject the tissue grafts. This becomes known as the Miracle of San Merida. This galvanizes the people of the village to fight back against the government. The villagers are still outgunned and on the surface seem to lose. Despite the apparent loss, the government is wary of the village because it is aware that in spirit it has truely never surrendered. The government tries to track down the doctor and baby in order to finally break the spirit of the people. This results in the medical student staying hidden for the next twenty years. He can never come out into the open again and so he never finishes his studies and never practices medicine again. The baby is adopted by a wealthy family from England. He remains ignorant of his history. As an adult, the young man starts to have weird dreams and odd medical problems. He eventually becomes a patient of Black Jack and together they track down his strange symptoms, which are linked to his miraculous background.