Sick China

In pestilence-ridden China, the pagoda-like buildings of Peiping Union Medical College ("Johns Hopkins of the Orient") have been a symbol of medical hope. Started in 1921 with Rockefeller money, the college was the birthplace of Chinese public health work, and trained many of China's modern medical leaders. The Japanese looted it, and after V-J day it served as headquarters for General George Marshall's abortive peace mission. Last week the college had an electrifying rebirth: the Rockefeller Foundation gave $10 million to restore and reopen it at better than prewar strength.*

The gift provides $2 million for equipment and an $8 million addition to the $12 million endowment--enough to make the college almost selfsupporting. For Chinese doctors, struggling against almost hopeless odds to check disease among China's war-weakened people, the reopening of the college will be a galvanizing shot in the arm.

The man on whom China's medical burden falls most heavily is 56-year-old Dr. J. Heng Liu, a onetime director of PUMC. Harvard-trained Dr. Liu was China's public health chief before the war, and Army Surgeon General during the war, is now chief medical officer of CNRRA (a cousin of UNRRA) and medical director of the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China.

Beds & Opium. Last week Dr. Liu arrived in Shanghai from Washington, where he had tried to salvage what he could from UNRRA's "wrecked program for China." He had a promise of $43 million in medical supplies from UNRRA, and another $2 million from ABMAC for aid to Chinese medical schools. But this was a mere trickle of assistance to China's yawning medical needs.

China needs at least 200,000 doctors, and has fewer than 12,000--one doctor for every 37,500 people (the U.S. has one for 1,200). Ravaged by tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, kala azar (a deadly parasitic disease), typhus, plague, venereal disease, China has a death rate estimated at three to four times that ofthe U.S. (In Shanghai, a sixth of the population have T.B.; an eighth,venereal diseases.) Among the nation's major postwar medical problems: 32,000,000 opium addicts.

Chinese medical facilities are fantastically primitive. Some hospital patients are required to bring their own beds, bedding, food and cooks. In rural areas, the best available medical treatment is furnished by traveling outdoor clinics, which announce their coming, as princes and officials used to do, with a vanguard of nurses, waving banners and ringing bells.

Superstitions & Fads. Doctors are often stymied by their patients' superstitious resistance to modern treatment. When the Government ordered cremation of the bodies of plague victims, relatives reacted so fiercely (on the ground that cremation would destroy the souls of the deceased) that the Government withdrew its order. Millions of Chinese women still modestly refuse to submit to a doctor's examination; instead, they keep handy a "medicine woman"--a small ivory nude on which they point out the site of their pains. Medical fads & fancies are prevalent even among China's upper classes; a current fad is "injections"--the substance injected is immaterial.

Dr. Liu's doctors are slogging ahead, regardless. In the past year, CNRRA and UNRRA mobile units vaccinated 6,000,000 people against plague and 1,000,000 against smallpox and cholera, deloused 2,500,000, gave medical treatment to 8,000,000. This year, China's 50-odd medical colleges hope to double or triple their enrollment (they now turn out only 1,000 doctors a year). CNRRA proposes to increase China's 30,000 hospital beds to 52,500. In Peiping's famed Temple of Heaven, ABMAC this month installed China's first penicillin plant.

*PUMC has been the biggest single Rockefeller Foundation project. The new gift, announced as a final one, raises the Foundation's total to the college to nearly $45 million.

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