, 11 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
This is Dr. Wu Lien-teh. He likely saved 100’s of thousands of lives, and you’ve probably never heard of him.
He was born March 10, 1879 in Penang Malaysia to two recent immigrants from Southern China. At 17 he was admitted to Cambridge University where he earned numerous awards, scholarships, and prizes before attaining his medical degree.
After returning to Malaysia though he was unable to work as a specialist or medical doctor as the result of colonial British regulations that reserved the highest medical positions for (white) British nationals. He ultimately opened his own private practice.
Despite (and likely because of) his work founding the Anti-Opium Assosiation in Penang, he was arrested for owning an ounce of opium he kept for treating patients in his dispensary. As a result he was invited to China by then Grand Councilor (future would be Emperor) Yuan Shikai.
One of his first assignments in China was to go to Harbin in China’s far North East to investigate an outbreak of an unknown disease that had a recorded 99.9% fatality rate and was spreading rapidly.
After only a few days he knew exactly what it was: Bubonic Plague. The foreign doctors mocked him, calling such a diagnosis impossible and refused to even wear face masks. Only after the death of a French doctor from the plague did they reconsider.
Dr. Wu also realized what was making the plague so much worse. Since it had hit in the winter, the bodies of the dead were being kept around until spring to be buried, allowing the disease to incubate in the warehouses they were kept in.
Additionally, the spring festival was quickly approaching and millions of people who travel to their hometowns to see family, potentially spreading the pandemic to all parts of the empire.
Dr. Wu ordered all the trains in the region stopped, and all the bodies to be immediately burned. By the end of March, the epidemic had been defeated. Nearly every person who had contracted the disease had perished. 60,000 in total lost their lives.
Dr. Wu would go on to live in Beiping for several decades under Republic of China rule. He worked extensively to promote medical science in China and was nominated for the Nobel prize in medicine before fleeing back to Malaysia to escape the Japanese advance in China.
I went and visited Dr. Wu’s house here in Beijing. It’s in bad shape and marked with a single plaque that says it is a cultural relic and does not mention Dr. Wu’s name, but amazingly it is still here.
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