In case you missed it, the movie Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp is sincerely trying to match its lead character with Florence Nightingale, the real-life pioneer of nursing. Her country, Britia, is a stand-in for Great Britain, and the major war that’s on or about to break out waves away all subtlety and takes place in Crimea, where Nightingale’s work is most known. Her last name, Clorence, is meant to rhyme with “Florence” (and the manhwa translation spells it “Clarence,” so the subtitles are trying to play this link up). Because Nightingale would wander the wards at night to check on patients, the nickname “lady with the lamp” (from the nineteenth century) was used to refer to her. Even though Elise’s medical career arc ends before the anime adaptation does, it’s still a commendable attempt to establish a parallel.
Part of the issue with the series is that last. It discusses Elise’s double rebirth and progresses through her passing the British medical board test, but it skips past character interactions and limits Elise’s abilities. Although she accomplishes incredible feats with no justification, her lack of worldbuilding and character development makes her seem like a Mary Sue. It’s great to see a strong female character in an anime STEM profession who isn’t stereotypically a raving nerd and who possesses both emotional and intellectual intelligence. Still, this is greatly undermined by the need to highlight Elise’s amazing medical skills. The open-ended climax has a genuine “read the manhwa, kids!” vibe to it, which runs the risk of falling flat due to anime’s lack of concern for giving Elise a human experience.
The other main problem is that it’s hard to get a basic idea of how advanced technology is in the planet of the novel. Some medical advancements are less obvious, but we do know that there are rifles but not autos, which is comfortably mid-19th century. The use of hypodermic needles and general anesthesia began in Europe in the 1840s, but the type of heart surgery Elise performs under the watchful and knowledgeable gaze of other medical professionals wasn’t used until the 1940s. But again, successful splenectomies were first carried out in Europe in 1549, and in England in the 1820s, so it feels strange for the British medical community to be shocked by one when they’re used to open cardiac surgery. Yes, all of this is fantasy, set in a fantasy setting. However, it begins to feel like bad worldbuilding given the obvious attempts to demonstrate Elise’s exceptional skill at her job rather than coming up with new ideas at every turn.
Apart from these problems, Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp succeeds in a number of areas. The main one is the underlining tale of a young lady who is attempting to succeed in an area that is not usually available to her. In the universe of the narrative, there are female nurses, but the majority of medical students and doctors are men, and it is implied that very few, if any, of them are nobles. Elise, an aristocratic lady, is up against the current as she attempts to resume her career as Aoi (Song Jihyun in Korean), and she also has two additional major obstacles from her previous existence. Elise was a spoilt brat before reincarnating into a post-modern life; upon awakening as Aoi, she finds Elise locked in her chamber for an undisclosed act of brattiness. She was anything from studious, as evidenced by her horrible handwriting (which also serves as a joke about doctors having unreadable handwriting), and she now has to put in a lot of effort to establish that she is not the same little girl she was an hour before. This is closely related to her engagement to Crown Prince Linden; in the past, Elise’s only wish was to wed him, which ultimately resulted in her (fictitious) Marie-Antoinette execution. Elise needs to end the engagement now in order to protect her neck and resume her career in medicine. She needs to continually prove herself because no one, least of all the king, who desires her bloodline, thinks she’s sincere.
What makes the series finest is watching Elise butt up against the king and his ambition to make her the empress (for reasons that seem primarily tied to her pedigree, though there’s some indication that they were birds of a selfish feather). It sounds so familiar: a woman wants to do something “unwomanly,” but the males in positions of authority won’t allow her to since it goes against social norms. Elise effortlessly wins over the medical community (part of her Mary Sue problem, it must be said), but the king keeps trying to stand in her way. He tries to convince her to marry Linden by rigging the medical board exam, but when that fails, he wheedles and cajoles. The way this plot is resolved, as far as it goes, is nearly as annoying because Elise is once more shown to be the bigger, gentler person, but it would have been far more exciting to have her slam the king with her medical achievements.
Watching this show can be at least somewhat irritating in a lot of ways. This is also due to the fact that the adaptation only reaches the beginning of the plot, leaving aspects like Elise’s connection with Linden and his brother Mikhail woefully undeveloped. Where they fit into her plans for the future is never entirely clear to us. Its animation and artwork are likewise not the best, yet they don’t stop viewers from watching. I like that among the medical conditions discussed, my father’s Parkinson’s disease is listed and briefly discussed. The best choice, nevertheless, if you want to experience Elise’s narrative, is to read the manhwa, which is currently available on Tapas in official English translation. While it’s not bad, it’s obvious that it could have been done better.
