Nokaze takes Jin and Saki to see her prostitute mentor, Yugiri. We get to learn what shocked Jin so at the end of the last episode. The woman has syphilis, also known as the French Disease. Unless your French, then it is the Italian Disease. If your Italian, it is the Spanish Disease. If you're from Spain -- eh, you get the idea. Nokaze begs the doctor to save her sensei, but Jin knows what Yugiri needs - penicillin - won't be discovered for a few more decades.
Jin asks Hikosaburo for permission to examine his girls for what they call the Sodoku (not to be confused with Sudoku) but the prostitutes are dead set against giving free peeks to their goodstuff. As Jin, Ogata Kouan and Saki are leaving the red light district, they see a covered body of a dead prostitute being carried out. The locals are saying she was sliced up. That must have been the person the Sweaty Panter was cutting on in the previous episode.
Jin decides to try his hand at making penicillin. He and the gang at the Western Medicine School work day and night in setting up what is basically a penicillin factory. There's a long scene with just Jin explaining to the others each step necessary in the production. Science was my worst class in school so I sort of blank out during this lecture.
This must be going to be important later on as the show keeps presenting it: Tachibana's eye has been caught by a near-sighted prostitute in the district.
As everyone waits to see if the cultures will show whether the batches of penicillin are strong enough to be effective or not, we get a flashback of when Nokaze was a little girl working for Yugiri, who did the Geisha Shuffle. That damned kaleidoscope Nokaze is always staring into originally belonged to Yugiri, so at least we've established why the thing is so important to her.
After an unnecessarily drawn-out scene with the doctors looking through all their petri dishes of penicillin, success! Jin and Saki (with her hair down!) rush back to treat Yugiri. For a few days there it looks good, but alas, Yugiri was too far gone with the disease and this batch of the antibiotic was just not strong enough. Despite it being socially beneath her, Saki offers to apply makeup and do Yugiri's hair so she can be pretty again. Nokaze and her sister-geisha say their farewells and Yugiri finally escapes from her suffering.
Jin and Saki go to his hangout (the cliff overlooking the city) and she asks him if the penicillin was a medicine from the future. (So I guess she did believe him when he said he was from the future. That clears that up for me.) Jin pulls out the picture of him and coma-girl and tells Saki a little bit about Miki. He explains the reason why he went ahead and tried to make penicillin earlier than it was historically supposed to be is because he hopes if he "pushes the needle" of medical knowledge just a little bit further than it was, then perhaps in the future when Miki is sick, the medicine of tomorrow will be able to save her.
Later when he's back home, Jin looks at the photograph and it has changed again. It's still of Miki and Jin, but this time they're outside somewhere having a barbecue. Meanwhile we learn the head honcho over the Western medicine school has fallen out of favor with the Powers That Be, so now the school is suffering as well. Some topless men (we only see their mouths) are talking about the slain prostitute. They have one of the new fangled scalpels that Jin designed. This one has the name Saburi stamped on it. (Saburi is one of the students at the medical school and an eager disciple of Jin's.) The topless men are going to plant evidence at the scene of the crime to incriminate Saburi in the woman's murder.
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