“Their necks are stretched out long, like ducks whose heads have been grabbed and pulled upward by an invisible hand” (Lu, 254). People show great curiosity when they watch the government kill the revolutionary cruelly. During this revolution, most people are just spectators who know nothing about the revolution and feel nothing about the death of revolutionaries. Both revolutionaries and people should feel grief about the ignorance.
Big-bolt is a representation of ignorant people whom revolutionaries fight for. He is poor, superstitious and numb. After he spent all of his family’s saving to buy the mantou with human blood, his son still dies in the end. He shows the main theme of Medicine, cannibalism. On the one hand, he is poor and is exploited by Qing government; on the other hand, he lets his son eat mantou with the revolutionary’s blood. “He takes it, packs it into his pocket with trembling hands, and then pats it a few time” (Lu, 253). By patting money again and again, Big-bolt tries to make sure the money is in his pocket, showing the price of mantou with blood costing almost all the savings of this poor family. He pins all his hope on the mantou to cure his son, but his son still dies because of people’s ignorance.
However, it is understandable that people are ignorant after the long-time decadent rule of feudalism and authoritarianism, so conscious revolutionaries are responsible for enlightening numb people. “But the Xia kid acts as though it’s just a regular conversation and starts tellin’ Redeye how the Great Manchu Empire belongs to all of us. Now stop and think for a second, does that sound like talk you’d expect out of a human being” (Lu, 257)? Xia, as a brave revolutionary, does not fear death and tries to persuade the prison guard against the government. Unfortunately, he does not mobilize the masses successfully. People do not understand anything about Xia’s belief, and they even think he is crazy. That’s the grief of revolutionaries at that time.
Ignorance is the main characteristic of people, but are they incorrigible? After people heard Xia kid said Ah-yi was pitiful, “the eye movements of all those who hear this suddenly freeze, and there is a general lull in the conversation” (Lu,257). During the short silence, people are touched deeply, but they fear to admit that they are pitiful and become numb again. People need medicine, not only the medicine to cure tuberculosis, but also the one that can develop people’s awareness of the conditions of their lives.