Dr. Wu Lien-teh and the plague of 1910-1911
Dr. Wu Lien-teh and a colleague carrying out fieldwork Photo: Hsu Chung-mao/THINK CHINA
On the evening of Dec. 24, 1910, a train glided slowly into the Harbin railway station. Dr. Wu Lien-teh, then 31 years old, stepped down from the platform with a Baker microscope in hand. He came to Harbin as the chief medical officer in charge of the anti-epidemic campaign in northeastern China. At that time, the city was under the shadow of death.
The first fatality was reported on Oct. 25, 1910. According to the Report of the Plague in Three Northeastern Provinces, two laborers who had returned to China from Russia died in the border town of Manzhouli. Within days, nearby residents died; their symptoms included fever, the coughing up of blood and deeply darkened skin after death.
Harbin received its earliest cases on Nov. 7, 1910. Two marmot hunters from Manzhouli died and infected their four roommates. The disease quickly spread through the whole city. At the time, Harbin was divided by railways into foreign-dominated and Chinese-dominated districts. Fujiadian, the center of the Chinese town, became the worst hit area due to its crowded conditions with poor sanitation. Panic also spread south to the national capital, Beijing. Alfred Sao-ke Sze, a diplomat of the Qing court, recalled in his memoirs that Harbin was reported to have suffered hundreds of deaths daily.
The newly appointed doctor
Wu Lien-teh was a Malayan-born Chinese doctor and the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at the University of Cambridge. Since 1908, Wu and his family had lived in Shanghai. On Dec. 18, 1910, a telegram from Beijing changed his life.
On the third day after arriving in Harbin, Wu heard that a Japanese woman married to a local man in Fujiadian had died from the epidemic. He decided to perform an autopsy on her body. During the time, autopsies were viewed as disrespectful to the dead and were prohibited by law. Wu had to perform the procedure secretly. This was the first recorded autopsy ever done in China. In a room he borrowed from the local General Chamber of Commerce, which he converted into a temporary laboratory, the oval-shaped bacterium captured in his Baker microscope helped Wu to conclude that the devastating epidemic was the plague. He quickly reported his findings to Beijing and proposed initial actions.
Wu noticed that some of the characteristics of this outbreak were contrary to the general belief that the plague could only be transmitted by rat or flea bites. In fact, before Wu’s arrival, a Japanese doctor had dissected hundreds of local rats but found no plague bacillus inside them. Wu further asserted that this plague could be transmitted by human breath or sputum without animals as vectors. He named it the pneumonic plague. In order to stop the spread, he designed an easy-to-wear protective mask made of a cotton wad encased in gauze at quite a low cost. This form of mask is called Wu’s Mask and is still in use today.
On New Year’s Eve of 1911, Wu visited some foreign consulates and announced his discoveries and anti-plague measures. However, his idea as well as masks were met with widespread disbelief until the death of Dr. Girard Mesny.
Mesny was a prominent French doctor and the first volunteer to arrive in Harbin after Wu requested additional medical staff. He however doubted Wu’s competency. In fact, before his journey to Harbin, Mesny visited Hsi-liang, the Governor-General of Three Northeastern Provinces, holding that he was more qualified to be the chief medical officer. Though Hsi-liang rejected Mesny’s request, Wu tendered his resignation in an attempt to resolve the conflict. The Qing government however rejected his resignation and relieved Mesny of his duty instead. After refusing to wear a mask even while attending patients, Mesny died of pneumonic plague within a few days. His death shocked Harbin. The Russians closed the hotel where he had lived and burnt all his belongings. Wu’s statement turned out to be correct and masks were soon adopted, extensively.
Anti-plague measures
The plague reached its peak in January 1911, but Wu and his team also received the most help from their peers. Under Wu’s advice, Fujiadian was divided into four zones, each one overseen by a medical officer. There were over 40 patrol teams carrying out daily inspections in each zone. The sick were sent to special hospitals and the homes of the infected were sterilized with sulphur and carbolic acid. What’s more, an infantry regiment of 1160 soldiers was sent to Harbin to impose blockades in these zones. Residents were not allowed to go to the other zones unless they had special permits. The measures taken in Fujiadian set an example for the whole anti-epidemic campaign. Soon, the other areas in the northeast followed suit. During the International Plague Conference later held in Mukden (Shenyang) in 1911, it was reported that the death toll in the month before the system was set up was as high as 3413. During the course of the system’s preparation, the plague killed up to 200 people a day. After 30 days, however, the death toll declined to zero. Wu also borrowed 120 freight cars to house those who had contracted the disease and suspected cases, where they had to undergo a 7-day quarantine.
On Jan. 11, the same day of Mesny’s death, Hsi-liang sent a telegram to the Qing court, applying for transportation lockdown in the northeast to prevent migrant workers from returning to their hometowns for the Chinese New Year. On Jan. 14, Japanese authorities were convinced to cease train operations under their control. On Jan. 21, the Qing government ordered trains to stop travelling between Tianjin and Beijing. At this point, all railway transport to and from the northeastern China had been cut off.
As the death toll in Harbin continued to rise, corpses of plague victims posed a great challenge to the anti-plague campaign. Without enough coffins, many exposed corpses littered graveyards, turning the ground into a perfect incubator for the plague bacillus in the freezing winter. The urgent task at hand was the removal of the unburied corpses through mass cremation, an act tantamount to sacrilege under age-old traditions. To overcome this obstacle, Wu sent a petition for an imperial edict to sanction the cremations. On Jan. 30, the Qing court sanctioned the cremations, making Jan. 31, also the second day of the Chinese New Year on the Lunar Calendar, a special day for Harbin residents. They witnessed the first cremation ever done in China. Over 2200 corpses were cremated. Wu recalled how 20,000 citizens of Fujiadian stared blankly as their loved ones were reduced to ashes. So far, 25% of the population in Fujiadian had died from the plague. The anti-plague office encouraged people to light firecrackers to dispel inauspicious spirits, a tradition of the Chinese New Year.
Miraculously, the death toll dropped from 183 to 165 on the first day of the Chinese New Year and declined gradually to zero, with no further infections by March 1. Several days later, the plague prevention committee announced the end of the quarantine in Fujiadian. Wu went on to aid in the other anti-plague efforts in nearby areas. By the end of April 1911, the plague had been eradicated from northeastern China.
Subsequent investigations
In July 1911, a scientific expedition sent out by China and Russia went to the border between Manzhouli, Siberia and Mongolia to investigate the marmots. Wu and Danilo Kirilovich Zabolotny, a leading Russian plague expert, were its members. Based on their field investigation, Wu published a paper titled “Investigations into the Relationship of the Tarbagan (Mongolian Marmot) to the Plague” in The Lancet in 1913. From his further research of infected wild tarbagan, Wu proved that the plague could be transmitted between marmots through the air without fleas as a vector, which meant it could be transmitted from person to person. In 1935, Wu became the first Chinese doctor nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Not only Dr. Wu, but all the medical staff who had been working in the anti-plague campaign should be remembered. During the early days of the outbreak, many Chinese and foreign medical workers, including Dr. Mesny, died from the plague due to a lack of advanced knowledge of the disease. In Changchun, 166 medical workers were killed by the plague. Wu listed the names of his deceased peers in his autobiography. The International Plague Conference also adjourned for half of a day to mourn and honor the medical staff who died in the battle against the plague.
After the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out, Wu returned to Malaysia and opened a private clinic. He passed away on Jan. 21, 1960.
The article was edited and translated from Life Week. Li Jing is a deputy editor of Life Week.
edited by REN GUANHNONG