Chimya Tolosse is Hohsalle’s clinic and research center in Kazan, a working base where care for patients and the investigation of disease meet. During the mittsual outbreak, it receives the bodies recovered from the salt mine and becomes a center for research into the disease and possible treatments.

Identity and Setting

The clinic’s name, Chimya Tolosse, means “Nest of Little People,” an unexpectedly modest title for a facility built through the governor’s support. It contains three research wings and a residence where Hohsalle lives with his assistants. When he is in Kazan, he commonly shuts himself away there for days, reflecting the clinic’s role as both his home and the center of his concentrated work.

The Clinic during the Outbreak

After Hohsalle and Makokan return from the salt mine, Hohsalle refuses Yotalu’s invitation to rest at his hall and goes straight back to Chimya Tolosse. The recovered corpses have already been delivered there, and Milalle, his longtime assistant and partner, has begun examining them with several other aides. At the mine, Hohsalle had noticed that every body bore dog-bite marks and a rash; the pattern turned attention away from suspected food poisoning and toward mittsual.

The clinic’s work depends on reading the bodies as evidence. Hohsalle explains that mittsual can pass through wolves and wild mountain dogs called ossam, and that fleas or ticks that have bitten infected hosts can carry it as well. Cold weather lowers the immediate danger from insects, though they may survive through winter in warm places. The investigation therefore combines observation of the victims with attention to how the disease might spread.

Research and Medical Conflict

Milalle describes the bodies as possible sources of several kinds of medical knowledge. Identifying the agents that cause mittsual could help researchers weaken them for a preparation that builds resistance, find substances that suppress or eliminate the disease, or discover antibodies in victims’ bodies that could support a serum for the infected. The dead are not treated as proof that inquiry has failed; their bodies may still reveal how to prevent or combat the illness.

That research rests on a different premise from the Pure Heart Creed, whose priest-doctors regard medicine as bound to divine teaching and may accept an incurable condition rather than pursue a cure. Hohsalle’s approach instead seeks the causes of disease and ways to prepare the body to resist them. He explains the body’s defenses as soldiers that must learn to recognize a particular disease agent, with weakened agents serving to teach them what the enemy looks like. Chimya Tolosse thus stands not only as a place of treatment and investigation but as a practical expression of the wider dispute over what medicine should seek to know and do.

People and Support

Hohsalle’s return to the clinic after the exhausting trip underscores how readily he gives himself to the investigation. Milalle counters that intensity with practical care: when he tries to go directly to the building holding the bodies, she steers him to the dining hall, where she has kept meat-and-onion stew warm by the hearth. After he eats and drinks honey-sweetened tea, color returns to his face. Her intervention shows that the clinic’s work depends not only on research but also on the people who sustain its principal physician.

The institution also relies on political cooperation. Yotalu welcomes Otawalle assistance and asks Hohsalle to guide the response, while Governor Ohan and his eldest son, Utalu, take the outbreak seriously and urge consultation with him. Because public disclosure could provoke panic and leave the realm vulnerable to invasion, decisions about the outbreak must be handled carefully. Chimya Tolosse is consequently both a research center and a point of contact between Otawalle medical knowledge and the authorities responsible for responding to the epidemic.