Medical Aid to China

A sober, mild, bespectacled, almost colorless man named Dr. . George William Bachman was last week very busy in the midst of one of the world's most appalling medical problems--that of China.

Most Chinese never see a doctor from life's beginning to its end. To provide one physician for each 1,500 of the population as planned in the wartime U.S., China would need 270,000 doctors. She has 9,000, perhaps half in the occupied areas.

Before the war China's National Health Administration could boast of tiny gains toward improved public health, but war has amputated many of China's health facilities. Drugs have to be imported by plane and the cargo space allotted to them is only 18 tons a month. Even these drugs are poorly distributed because of hoarding, lack of internal transportation and the complete isolation of guerrilla areas from medical help. A wounded Chinese must usually rely on stoicism rather than morphine.

Starvation, endemic in China, is more acute in war, increases the hazard of epidemics. The Japs have added new plague foci by dropping infected grains of rice and shreds of cloth from planes on plague-clean areas.

China's Army of 5,000,000 has less than 1,000 doctors (the U.S. aim is to have six and a half doctors for every 1,000 troops). Chinese soldiers are universally infested with lice, making them ready prey to typhus. Modern methods of camp sanitation are almost unknown. For every man wounded or killed, ten die of disease. (In the U.S. World War I army, only one died of disease for every 14 wounded or killed.)

Spreading Thin. The American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (now part of United China Relief) is represented in China by Dr. George W. Bachman. Though 52-year-old Dr. Bachman speaks in platitudes ("I am looking out for a way to help the war effort"), he is a topnotch scientist with a talent for organization. From 1918 to 1922 he lived in China, teaching biology at Huping College. When the Bureau sent him to Chungking last April he had for eleven years been director of Columbia University's famed School of Tropical Medicine in Puerto Rico.

Last week Dr. Bachman was working on the first survey ever made of China's whole medical problem. Dr. Bachman's other job is "not to create new projects but to maintain existing ones which are dying from stress, shortages, inflation and war." Since Lend-Lease and the American Red Cross have taken over sending medical supplies to China the Bureau's efforts have been concentrated on three projects: > An Emergency Medical Service Training School at Tuyunkuan, Kweiyang plans to have a branch for each of the nine war areas, has five so far. To the schools the Bureau has contributed teachers, supplies (such as trucks, instruments), money. In courses as short as possible, 6,283 workers have been trained--about 600 Army doctors, 2,000 assistant medical officers (63 of them midwives), 377 nurses (China has about 5,000 others), 1,626 pharmacists, 3,600 sanitary technicians (to teach latrine digging, debusing, etc.). >The Bureau helps the National Health Administration in epidemic control, preventive medicine and in procuring doctors from abroad.

>The Bureau helps China's four national medical colleges keep going.

To assure fair allocation of funds and prompt attention to emergency needs Dr. Bachman has assembled a central committee of high-ranking Chinese and representatives of cooperating American agencies. For 1943 the committee has earmarked $700,000 for the National Health Administration (mostly to give a little more money to almost-starving health officers), $1,300,000 for the training schools, $140,000 each for the medical schools.

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