Niu Hui-sheng (14 June 1892-4 May 1937), known as W. S. New, founder of the Shanghai Orthopedic Hospital, devoted his life to the improvement of conditions in hospitals and the raising of standards in the medical profession in China.

Shanghai was the birthplace of W. S. New. He was the son of Shangchow New (Niu Shangchou), an American-educated engineer, and the former Ni Kuei-chin, a teacher at the Bridgman Girls School in Shanghai. Both of his parents were devout Congregationalists. After receiving his early education in the Chinese classics from private tutors, W. S. New attended the Anglo- Chinese Public School and the St. John's Middle School. In 1907 he enrolled at St. John's University.

In 1910, having received a B.A. degree from St. John's University, W. S. New went to the United States to study at the Harvard University Medical School. He was admitted to the Boylston Medical Society in 1913 after presenting a paper on "Acute Anterior Poliomyelitis" in March of that year. After receiving an M.D. degree from Harvard in 1914, New served as a house physician and surgeon at St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and worked in its Floating Hospital for pediatrics. He returned to Shanghai in August 1915 to assume charge of the department of anatomy at the Harvard Medical School of China. In 1915 he surveyed the state of orthopedic care in government and missionary hospitals in China and decided to specialize in orthopedics so that he could improve the plight of the crippled and maimed in China. He went to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1916 and became an assistant in orthopedics at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Children's Hospital. He also served in the out-patient department of the Carney Hospital in Boston and taught bacteriology at the Harvard Medical School. In 1917 he became a licensed physican, and he was appointed orthopedic house surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. He held that post until May 1918, when he went to Baltimore to serve briefly as an orthopedic assistant at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. During the 1917-18 period, he joined the American Medical Association, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the American Orthopedic Association.

In 1918 W. S. New returned to China as head of orthopedic surgery at the Peking Union Medical College, a post he held until June 1920. He served as secretary of the Peking Medical Society in 1919-20, and he also was an officer of the St. John's University Alumni Association of Peking, the Harvard Club of North China, and the American University Club of North China. In 1920 he moved to Shanghai and established a private practice, which he maintained until 1929. He also became a visiting surgeon at the Margaret Williamson Hospital in Shanghai and a consulting surgeon at hospitals in Soochow and Hangchow. In 1922-26 he was superintendent of the Red Cross Hospital at Shanghai, and in 1928-29 he was surgeon general of the Chinese Red Cross. He was elected a fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1927, thus becoming the first Chinese to receive that honor. In 1929 he founded the Orthopedic Hospital of Shanghai, then the only hospital of its kind in East Asia. He planned every detail of its design and operation, and it came to be regarded as a model institution.

In the 1930's W. S. New devoted most of his time and energy to the operation of the Orthopedic Hospital of Shanghai, of which he served as superintendent and chief surgeon. He was pleased when, in 1931, it came to be used as a Red Cross hospital for the teaching of orthopedic surgery. New also found time to serve as professor of anatomy and medical jurisprudence at the St. John's University Medical School and the Women's Christian Union Medical School in Shanghai and as a lecturer at the medical school of Central University. He organized a chain of clinics for factory workers, and at various times he served as a member of the medical board of the Shanghai Municipal Council, medical officer of the Yangtze River and Whangpoo River conservation commissions, medical adviser to the Shanghai-Nanking and the Shanghai- Hangchow-Ningpo railways, honorary superintendent of the Chinese Infectious Diseases Hospital, and medical director of the National Child Welfare Association.

W. S. New was an able administrator who worked assiduously to improve conditions in hospitals and standards in the medical profession in China. He was a charter member of the National Medical Association of China, founded in 1915, and a member since 1915 of the China Medical Missionary Association (later the China Medical Association). When these two organizations were merged in 1932 to form the Chinese Medical Association, W. S. New was elected president of the new body. He took a leading role in the direction of an energetic financial campaign which enabled the association to acquire its own building in Shanghai. New's health never had been robust, and the burdens he assumed in preparing for the association's 1934 conference at Nanking brought on a severe illness from which he never recovered. Despite his poor health, he assumed even heavier responsibilities in 1935, when he agreed to serve as general secretary of the Chinese Medical Association until a suitable younger man could be trained for the post. He founded a crippled children's ward at the Kwangchi Hospital in 1935, served as chairman of that hospital's board of directors in 1936, and became superintendent ofChungshan Memorial Hospital in Shanghai in 1937. He died of nephritis at Shanghai on 4 May 1937.

W. S. New was respected by both Chinese and Western medical colleagues as a major force in the development of modern medicine in China and as a man who strove to create a more humane and scientific attitude toward such patients as factory workers and children than had been characteristic of the Chinese medical profession in the past. He also was known as a civic leader in Shanghai. He was a leader in the alumni affairs of St. John's University, a Mason, and a Rotarian. W. S. New was survived by his wife, nee Hsu I-chen, and his son, Peter Kong-ming New (Niu K'ang-min, 1928-). The daughter of Hsu Hui-ch'eng, a professor of Chinese history at St. John's University, Hsu I-chen was a graduate of Ginling College and Teachers College, Columbia University. She and W. S. New were married in Shanghai on 24 February 1924 at a Congregational church which his family had helped support for many years. Peter New was schooled in the United States after his father's death; he became a medical sociologist.