Doctor Elise (Queen with a Scalpel) ( 2017-2021) - :(
Genre mashups can be a delightful and refreshing change of pace. When it comes to medical dramas, I think that there is plenty of room for romance, comedy, mystery, and many long running series out there prove that point. However, when I picked up this isekai/medical/drama manhwa it became very apparent to me that in embracing so many elements that were so disparate that they were not meshing well. One exception is the arc where the protagonist went to war as a field nurse, as that seemed to blend the fantasy-like nature of the setting with her skillset much more naturally.
Elise, the titular character, is our isekai protagonist which is how they manage to pack a lifetime of successful surgical knowledge into the body of a teenage aristocrat. As it so happens she also has knowledge from a different previous life in this world so this is an exercise for her in trying not to repeat the same mistakes twice and save as many lives as she can along the way. Great? Great. However, the isekai story and the medical story never actually mesh with one another. The romance is lackluster, and the protagonists lack chemistry to the point where I am hard pressed to remember the male lead’s name. The medical portion is presented more like a procedure focused drama, where there is some high stakes reason why Elise needs to perform a risky surgery that no one has ever conceived of before and yet this seems to happen over and over. It starts to really fray at suspension of doubt, even more than the standard isekai.
The thing that frustrated me the most about this series is that I think it could have been solid if it had focused on either patching up the relationships that surrounded the prince and the succession battle or on the hospital where Elise worked. By trying to give each item equal time, it really fought itself. The strengths of this story should have been with Elise making her way in the medical world and the relationships and insider drama inherent to a hospital, not with the handsome prince and his sad familial back story. If only this could have been two different manhwa, I’d be able to recommend it.
