Wu Lien-teh (10 March 1879-21 January 1960), pioneer in modern medical research and administration in China. He gained international recognition for his measures to end the disastrous plague in Manchuria in 1910-11, and he directed the Manchurian Plague Prevention Service from 1912 to 1930. In 1930-37 he headed the National Quarantine Service at Shanghai.
The son of a Cantonese goldsmith and his Malaya-born Hakka wife, Wu Lien-teh was born and raised at Penang amid contrasting Malayan, Chinese, and European influences. His education, however, was wholly British. After being graduated from the Penang Free School in 1896, he received a Queen's Scholarship for study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He decided to study medicine, and his progress in England was rapid and distinguished. In 1897 Wu Lien-teh took his first professional M.B. examination, and two years later he received a B.A. degree and became a Foundation Fellow of Emmanuel College. In the autumn of 1899 he won a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital, London, where he was the first Chinese student to be enrolled. His name appeared on the records at St. Mary's, as at Cambridge, as G. L. Tuck. At St. Mary's, Wu was awarded the Kerslake Scholarship in pathology in 1901 and the Cheadle gold medal for clinical medicine in 1902. Also in 1902 he assumed a housemanship at Brompton Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, and he received a research scholarship from Emmanuel College. After receiving the degree of MB. Bch. in 1903, he traveled and studied briefly with Ronald Ross at the Tropical Diseases Institute at Liverpool, Karl Fraenkel at Halle-an-der-Salle, and Elie Metchinikoff at the Institut Pasteur. In September 1903 he returned to Malaya.
Wu worked for a year at the newly established Institute for Medical Research at Kuala Lumpur. Because the prospects for a Chinese in colonial government service were poor, he entered private practice in 1904. St. Mary's Hospital, London, awarded him the M.D. degree in 1905. That year, he married Ruth Huang (Huang Shu-chiung) whose sister was the wife of the first Malayan Chinese to have qualified in Western medicine, Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wen-ch'ing, q.v.). Wu's major outside interest at this time was the anti-opium movement. In 1906 he organized the first Anti-Opium Conference for the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States, held at Ipoh. It was with the keenest bitterness, therefore, that he Wu Lien-teh found himself charged with possessing in his surgery a quantity of tincture of opium later that year. He was convicted and fined, although he maintained that the charges were false and that the British authorities were singling him out to teach him a lesson. The incident did nothing to alter Wu's advocacy of anti-opium legislation, but it led him to reconsider his career in Penang. In 1907 he went to London to address an anti-opium rally and to reconsider his future. After returning to Penang, he went to China in 1908 and, at the behest of Yuan Shih-k'ai, became vice director of the Army Medical College at Tientsin.
The climactic opportunity of Wu's life then presented itself. In November 1910 plague had reached epidemic proportions in Harbin, decimating the population and threatening to spread throughout the whole of Manchuria and north China. Abruptly, in late December, Wu was summoned from Tientsin by Sao-ke Alfred Sze (Shih Chao-chi, q.v.) then serving in the ministry of foreign affairs, and was asked to proceed to Harbin to take charge of plague control measures. Wu left Peking on 24 December 1910, accompanied by a single assistant, Lin Chia-swee, a senior student from the Army Medical College.
On arrival at Harbin, Wu quickly saw that the plague was spreading for two reasons: tradition-bound local officials declined to take elementary hygienic precautions, such as the destruction of diseased corpses by cremation; the vectors of the infection had been misidentified by the Western-trained doctors on the scene. Wu immediately memorialized the throne for permission to destroy disease-ridden corpses, and obtained it. At the same time, he studied the plague and discovered that it was not spread by rats. Rather, it originated in the infected lungs of the tabagan, a species of marmot valued for its pelt, which in turn passed the deadly virus on to hunters and trappers and thence to the population at large. Appalled by the absence of any properly organized preventive service and the inadequacy of local sanitary arrangements, Wu set to work to get the plague under control with his own methods. He encountered initial opposition, but his ideas soon prevailed as the death rate started to decline. Helped by a considerable body of medical personnel, he enforced drastic disciplinary measures in the plague area and ordered the wholesale cremation of corpses. The last case of plague was registered on 1 March 1911, after an epidemic of five months and 60,000 deaths. In April Wu was ordered to make his report to the emperor and was made a major in the imperial army.
His success in Harbin brought Wu Lien-teh recognition as the leading Chinese authority on plague. In the same month in which he received his army commission, he was sent to Mukden, where he organized an international conference on plague control. He was appointed medical adviser to the ministry of foreign affairs, but almost immediately he was granted leave to form a special anti-plague service in Manchuria. Wu established his headquarters at Harbin and ordered construction of a modern hospital and laboratories. Wu's new organization soon grew into the Manchurian Plague Prevention Service, of which he served as director from 1912 to 1930. During the years of its existence the service was credited with the suppression or control of a number of diseases and the significant lowering of the death rate throughout its jurisdiction.
Immediately after completing the organization of the service, Wu made the first of a long series of trips abroad to attend the International Opium Conference held at The Hague. There, in 1912, he was one of the chief signatories to the First Convention for Control and Suppression of Narcotics. In August-September 1913 Wu attended the International Congress of Medicine in London and from there went on to Buffalo, New York, where he spoke at the International Conference on School Hygiene. Upon his return to China at the end of the year, he submitted a long memorandum on medical education to the republican government at Peking. As a result, a presidential mandate was issued legalizing dissection of corpses for teaching purposes.
In 1915 Wu was elected honorary secretary of the newly formed National Medical Association. He edited its journal from 1915 to 1921 and served as its president from 1916 to 1920. In 1924 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Public Health, and he spent a year of research at The Johns Hopkins University. He represented China at the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine conference held at Tokyo in October 1925, and in 1927 he studied health organizations in Europe as the recipient of a League of Nations traveling fellowship.
On 1 November 1928 the National Government inaugurated a new ministry of health at Nanking. A year later, plans for a National Quarantine Service were announced. Wu was selected to head the new service, and he assumed office on 1 July 1930, with headquarters on the Bund at Shanghai. The new organization steadily increased its scope and responsibilities, and for the first time a systematic rat-flea service was established in all of the principal Chinese ports. The Manchurian Plague Prevention Service, on the other hand, did not long survive Wu's departure. It ceased operations after the Japanese advanced into Manchuria in 1931.
Wu served as director of the National Quarantine Service until the invasion of China by Japan in 1937 caused the cessation of health services in Shanghai. Unwilling to remain in Japanese-occupied Shanghai but equally unwilling to make the long trek to Chungking, Wu returned to Malaya, where he set up practice at Penang and later in Ipoh.
After the war, Wu played no significant role in the Malayan independence movement, although at one time he was identified with the "Queen's Chinese" as being opposed to the federation. Wu was not a political man, and he seems to have taken no part on either side in the Chinese civil war. Shortly after the Communist capture of Peiping, he presented his house there to the Chinese Medical Association for use as its headquarters. Wu Lienteh died quietly at Penang on 21 January 1960.
Wu was richly honored during his lifetime, receiving honorary degrees from Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Peking, St. Johns (Shanghai), Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He was also a member of the Academia Sinica, a foreign member of the Society of Microbiology (U.S.S.R.), and physician extraordinary to successive presidents of the Chinese Republic. Wu wrote many monographs and several books, of which the last was his autobiography, Plague Fighter, published in 1959. Wu married twice. His first wife, Huang Shu-chiung, died in 1937. His second wife was Li Shu-chen, who survived him. Wu had three sons by his first marriage and two sons and three daughters by his second.
