Wu Lien-teh

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's civil society. He joined them in editing The Straits Chinese Magazine.[4] 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.[10][4] 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.[4]

In 1908, Dr Wu accepted the then Grand Councillor Yuan Shikai's offer to become the Vice Director of the Imperial Army Medical College, now known as the Army Medical College, based in Tianjin, in 1908. This was established to train doctors for the Chinese Army.[3]

In the winter of 1910, Wu was given instructions from the Foreign Office of the Imperial Qing court[11] in Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease that killed 99.9% of its victims.[12] This was the beginning of the large pneumonic plague epidemic of Manchuria and Mongolia, which ultimately claimed 60,000 lives.[13]

Wu was able to conduct a postmortem (usually not accepted in China at the time) on a Japanese woman who had died of the plague.[4][14] Having ascertained via the autopsy that the plague was spreading by air, Wu developed surgical masks into more substantial masks with layers of gauze and cotton to filter the air.[15][16] Gérald Mesny, a prominent French doctor who had come to replace Wu, refused to wear a mask and died days later of the plague.[14][15][4] The mask was widely produced, with Wu overseeing the production and distribution of 60,000 masks in a later epidemic, and it featured in many press images.[17][15] It is believed that the N95 mask is the descendant of Wu's design.[18]

Wu initiated a quarantine, arranged for buildings to be disinfected, and the old plague hospital to be burned down and replaced.[4] The measure that Wu is best remembered for was in asking for imperial sanction to cremate plague victims.[4] 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.[3] 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.[19]

Wu chaired the International Plague Conference in Mukden (Shenyang) in April 1911, a historic event attended by scientists from the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Mexico, and China.[20][21] 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.[20] 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 (Chuang Guandong) for using hunting methods that captured more sick animals and increased risk of exposure.[22]

Group photo of Messrs. Jan van L., Dr. Wu Lien Teh and Professor De Langen, Tandjong Priok, Batavia, c. 1928

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 (1916–1920).[3][23]

Wu led the efforts to combat the 1920-21 cholera pandemic in the north-east of China.[4]

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.[10]

In the 1930s he became the first director of the National Quarantine Service.[3]

Around 1939, Wu moved back to Malaya and continued to work as a general practitioner in Ipoh.[4]

Wu collected donations to start the Perak Library (Now the Tun Razak Library) in Ipoh, a free-lending public library, and donated to Shanghai City Library and the University of Hong Kong.[4]

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 honorary degrees by Johns Hopkins University, Peking University, University of Hong Kong, and University of Tokyo.[3][4]

• Dr Wu Lien-Teh Centre for Research on Communicable Diseases, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman
• Wu Lien-Teh Institute, Harbin Medical University

Wu's work in the field of epidemiology has contemporary relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic.[15][26][30]

In May 2020, Dr. Yvonne Ho united the 22 known "medical and scientific descendants" of Dr. Wu Lien-Teh for a video conference meeting spanning 14 cities around the world.[31][32] In July 2020, some of these medical and scientific descendants collaborated to publish an article to memorialize Dr. Wu's lifetime work in public health.[33] In August 2020, a second group of Wu's medical and scientific descendants collaborated on a similar piece.[34]

In March 2021, Wu was honoured with a Google Doodle, depicting Wu assembling surgical masks and distributing them to reduce the risk of disease transmission.[35][36][37]