MALAYA MONGOLIA AND THE MASK. THE STORY OF DR WU LIEN TEH OF PENANG,

Originally from the Before the Cure archive

MALAYSIA, MONGOLIA AND THE MASK
HISTORY OF THE FACE MASK

Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.
Its title is an Armenian proverb; “Ըսէ՛ ով է ընկերդ, ըսեմ ով ես դու | Tell Me Who Your Friends Are, I’ll Tell You Who You Are.” In other words, you can tell a lot about people by the company they keep.
I think of this proverb in terms of enhancement of knowledge. Very early in my life I recognized that you cannot master all the knowledge, even the knowledge you are interested in, without the help of friends.
This morning, I am in Miami, I had a wonderful conversation with a friend from Wuhan, China. Our conversation began with culture and environment and soon turned on to Grotesque realism of Mikhail Bakhtin and carnavalesque (as described in the Pantegruel) and then to the anthropological significance of face mask.
I will dedicate another blog to that.

I decided to look up the history of face-mask and imagine my glee when i came upon the extraordinary life of Dr. Wu Lien Teh (Wu Liande), born in Penang in 1879. His mother was a second generation Hakka and father was an immigrant from Tinshan, China.
He won every scholarship, merit and rewards known to students and on a Queens Scholarship attended Cambridge and read Medicine.

At that time British Malaya would only allow British Nationals to hold senior posts in the Health services. Dr. Wu was very socially conscious and his anti-opium activities caught the eyes of local dons who made him leave Penang for China.
This brilliant Malay Chinese had a mind which was far beyond the scientific horizon of that time.
Here is something about him from Wikipedia:

In the winter of 1910, Wu was given instructions from the Foreign Office, Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease which 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 (usually not accepted in China at the time) 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. 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.

Wu initiated a quarantine and 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 (Shenyang) 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, Professor Danylo Zabolotnyi 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 blamed more recent Shandong immigrants to the area for using methods that captured more sick animals and increased risk of exposure.

There are lessons from Dr Wu for the current crisis.
He had trouble convincing others that the pneumonic plague was not due to Rats but it was airborne and that he had to introduce a simple form of the surgical mask which he had seen in England during his student days. He might have saved millions of lives because of that.
The mortality with that illness was close to 100 per cent. The plague was caused by Yersinia Pestis.
Then why are not people especially in the west listening to the Mask recommendation? Germany has made it mandatory and I think also Austria . In Israel is mandatory as well, the three top countries where the control of this virus has been exemplary.
Why this resistance to mask in the west ?
as seen above, the french doctor who arrived in China at that time laughed at the idea of wearing the mask, possibly ridiculing Dr.Wu and was dead three days later. The reluctance may have deeper reasons, worthy of anthropological examination.

In the words of Wu (1934a: 363):

The era of modern preventive medicine may be said to have commenced in 1911, when the Chinese government and people noticed the great superiority of accurate scientific methods, as compared to the crude haphazard methods for the suppression of the pneumonic plague in Manchuria. On one hand, they saw a body of clean, earnest, and fearless young men equipped with knowledge, microscopes, instruments and disinfectants and succeeding in their work of suppressing the epidemic; on the other, they encountered talkative, old-fashioned, uncertain men, whose one idea was to needle and drug the patients and who, because they took no precautions against the disease, died as easily as the patients.

I could not help noticing the sentence from this erudite doctor..

” they encountered talkative, old-fashioned, uncertain men”

and the similarity to the some of the politicians and their lackeys, sprouting words without wisdom, and as Shakespeare would put it, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Health in the USA is the Dr. Wu of our era.

Dr Wu had a cultural eye, I can see. Having born and grown in Penang among the Malays, Indians and Chinese immigrants as well as Chinese acculturated from the time of Zheng He the great Chinese naval admiral, he must have been open to the cultural diversity.
What a brilliant idea! When someone suggested that the organism had jumped from Marmot to man through hunters, Dr. Wu correctly observed and questioned why the traditional marmot hunters had been spared and the immigrant marmot hunters from Shandong who did not know the traditional methods of what types of marmots to trap. Just brilliant!

The natives usually knew how to beware of infected rodents and localities. Even when human cases arose, they remained isolated on account of the drastic measures adopted by relatives and neighbours who as a rule left the victims to their fate, hurriedly shifting camp. It is evident that this system of precautions produced excellent results as long as the nomadic habits of the natives were upheld and the sparse population did not increase with the influx of new elements. Modern civilisation through facilitating immigration into these ancients foci of infection tended to spread the disease from them, especially as the state of existing equilibrium was liable to become upset. (Wu 1936: 30)

A Buryat with his bow.

M. sibirica the marmot in question ..

Dr. Wu can be really accorded the respect of being the Father of modern Face Mask and I would claim him to the greatest physician-scientist that lived in the Peninsular Malaysia.

Traditional Chinese伍連德
Simplified Chinese伍连德

It was Dr. Wu who popularized Face Mask in China and other Asian countries which does not carry the stigma that it carries in the west. The above photo taken in HK during SARS outbreak.

DR. WU OF PENANG.

I dedicate this blog to two people: 1. my good friend, Mun Ching Yong of Kuala Lumpur , who drove me to Penang to meet Mr Idris Mohammad of Consumer Association of Penang
Here is the blog I wrote after that:
https://medicoanthropologist.blogspot.com/2012/04/prophet-of-penang.html

The second dedication is to BS of Wuhan City, Hubei Province, a conversation that started me on this train of thought about masks.

(Buryats now, at a village celebration)

Original Blogger URL: https://medicoanthropologist.blogspot.com/2020/04/malaya-mongolia-and-mask-story-of-dr-wu.html

View original Blogger post

Back to stories Search the full archive