Wu Lien-teh


Wu Lien-teh, also known as Goh Lean Tuck and Ng Leen Tuck in Minnan and Cantonese transliteration respectively, was a Malaysian physician renowned for his work in public health and particularly, the Manchurian plague of 1910–11.
Wu was the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at the University of Cambridge. He was also the first Malayan nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1935.

Life and education

Wu was born in Penang, one of the three towns of the Straits Settlements. The Straits Settlements formed part of the colonies of Great Britain. His father was a new immigrant from Taishan, China, and he worked as a goldsmith. His mother's family also originated from China: she was a Hakka second-generation resident of Malaya. Wu had four brothers and six sisters. His early education was at the Penang Free School.
Wu was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1896, after winning the Queen's Scholarship. He had a successful career at university, winning virtually all the available prizes and scholarships. His undergraduate clinical years were spent at St Mary's Hospital, London and he then continued his studies at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the Pasteur Institute, Halle University, and the Selangor Institute.
Wu returned to the Straits Settlement in 1903. Some time after that, he married Ruth Shu-chiung Huang, whose sister was married to Lim Boon Keng, a physician who promoted social and educational reforms in Singapore. The sisters were daughters of Wong Nai Siong, a Chinese revolutionary leader and educator who had moved to the area from 1901 to 1906.
Wu and his family moved to China in 1907. During his time in China, Wu's wife and two of their three sons died.
During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in November 1931, Wu was detained and interrogated by the Japanese authorities under suspicion of being a Chinese spy.
In 1937, during the Japanese occupation of much of China and the retreat of the Nationalists, Wu was forced to flee, returning to the Settlements to live in Ipoh. His home and collection of ancient Chinese medical books was burnt.
In 1943 Wu was captured by Malayan left-wing resistance fighters and held for ransom. Then he nearly was prosecuted by the Japanese for supporting the resistance movement by paying the ransom, but was protected by having treated a Japanese officer.
Sometime after moving to Ipoh, Wu remarried and had four more children. One of Wu's daughters, Yu-lin Wu, also became a physician.

Career

In September 1903 Wu joined the Institute for Medical Research in Kuala Lumpur as the first research student. However, there was no specialist post for him because, at that time, a two-tier medical system in the British colonies provided that only British nationals could hold the highest positions of fully qualified medical officers or specialists. Wu spent his early medical career researching beri-beri and roundworms before entering private practice toward the end of 1904 in Chulia Street, Penang.

Opium

Wu was a vocal commentator on the social issues of the time. In the early 1900s, he became friends with Lim Boon Keng and Song Ong Siang, a lawyer who was active in developing Singapore civil society. He joined them in editing The Straits Chinese Magazine. With his friends, Wu founded the Anti-Opium Association in Penang. He organised a nationwide anti-opium conference in the spring of 1906 that was attended by approximately 3000 people. This attracted the attention of the powerful forces involved in the lucrative trade of opium and, in 1907, this led to a search and subsequent discovery of one ounce of tincture of opium in Wu's dispensary, for which he was convicted and fined.
Wu began work for the Chinese government in 1907 and became vice director of the Army Medical College, based in Tianjin, in 1908.

Pneumonic plague

In the winter of 1910, Wu was given instructions from the Foreign Office, Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease that killed 99.9% of its victims. This was the beginning of the large pneumonic plague pandemic of Manchuria and Mongolia, which ultimately claimed 60,000 victims.
Wu was able to conduct a postmortem on a Japanese woman who had died of the plague. Having ascertained via the autopsy that the plague was spreading by air, Wu developed surgical masks he had seen in use in the West into more substantial masks with layers of gauze and cotton to filter the air. Gérald Mesny, a prominent French doctor who had come to replace Wu refused to wear a mask and died days later of the plague. The mask was widely produced, with Wu overseeing the production and distribution of 60,000 masks in a later pandemic, and it featured in many press images. It is believed that the N95 mask is the descendant of Wu's design.
Wu initiated a quarantine, arranged for buildings to be disinfected, and the old plague hospital to be burned down and replaced. The measure that Wu is best remembered for was in asking for imperial sanction to cremate plague victims. It was impossible to bury the dead because the ground was frozen, and the bodies could only be disposed of by soaking them in paraffin and burning them on pyres. Cremation of these infected victims turned out to be the turning point of the epidemic; days after cremations began, plague began to decline and within months it had been eradicated.
Wu chaired the International Plague Conference in Mukden in April 1911, a historic event attended by scientists from the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Mexico, and China. The conference took place over three weeks and featured demonstrations and experiments.
Wu later presented a plague research paper at the International Congress of Medicine, London in August 1911 which was published in The Lancet in the same month.
At the plague conference, epidemiologists Danylo Zabolotny and Anna Tchourilina announced that they had traced the initial cause of the outbreak to Tarbagan marmot hunters who had contracted the disease from the animals. A tarabagan became the conference mascot. However, Wu raised the question of why traditional marmot hunters had not experienced deadly epidemics before. He later published a work arguing that the traditional Mongol and Buryat hunters had established practices that kept their communities safe and he blamed more recent Shandong immigrants to the area for using hunting methods that captured more sick animals and increased risk of exposure.

Later career

In 1912, Wu became the first director of the Manchurian Plague Service. He was a founder member and first president of the Chinese Medical Association.
Wu led the efforts to combat the 1920-21 cholera pandemic in the north-east of China.
In 1929, he was appointed a trustee of the 'Nanyang Club' in Penang by Cheah Cheang Lim, along with Wu Lai Hsi, Robert Lim Kho Seng, and Lim Chong Eang. The 'Nanyang Club', an old house in Peiping, China, provided convenient accommodation to overseas Chinese friends.
In the 1930s he became the first director of the National Quarantine Service.
Around 1939. Wu moved back to Malaya and continued to work as a general practitioner in Ipoh.
Wu collected donations to start the Perak Library in Ipoh, a free-lending public library, and donated to Shanghai City Library and the University of Hong Kong.
Wu was a mandarin of the second rank and sat on advisory committees for the League of Nations. He was given awards by the Czar of Russia and the President of France, and was awarded honourary degrees by Johns Hopkins University, Peking University, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Tokyo.

Death and commemoration

Wu practised medicine until his death at the age of 80. He had bought a new house in Penang for his retirement and had just completed his 667-page autobiography, Plague Fighter, the Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician. On 21 January 1960, he died of a stroke while in his home in Penang.
A road named after Wu can be found in Ipoh Garden South, a middle-class residential area in Ipoh. In Penang, a private road named Taman Wu Lien Teh is located near the Penang Free School. In that school, his alma mater, a house has been named after him. There is a Dr. Wu Lien-teh Society, Penang.
The Wu Lien-teh Collection, which comprises 20,000 books, was given by Wu to the Nanyang University, which later became part of the National University of Singapore.
The Art Museum of the University of Malaya has a collection of Wu's paintings.
In 1995, Wu's daughter, Dr. Yu-lin Wu, published a book about her father, Memories of Dr. Wu Lien-teh, Plague Fighter.
In 2015, the Wu Lien-Teh Institute opened at Harbin Medical University. In 2019, The Lancet launched an annual Wakley-Wu Lien Teh Prize in honour of Wu and the publication's founding editor, Thomas Wakley.
Dr. Wu Lien-teh is regarded as the first person to modernise China's medical services and medical education. In Harbin Medical University, bronze statues of him commemorate his contributions to public health, preventive medicine, and medical education.
During the Coronavirus disease outbreak of 2019, several scholars argued that Wu's work had contemporary relevance to the field of epidemiology.