Two men of importance

Amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, there is growing interest and awareness among people, certainly in Malaysia, of the work done by Dr Wu Lien-Teh who is generally accepted as the man who helped to prevent the large-scale spread of the plague in China in 1911.

Like the doctors and nurses fighting the Covid-19 coronavirus today, Wu Lien-Teh was at the forefront of the frontliners battling the Black Death in China then. Sure, 60,000 people had died in China before the plague was eradicated but this statistic has to be measured against a time when medicine in China could still be considered prehistoric. Today, although medicine in China is now so far more advanced than before, yet about 4,600 deaths were recorded for Covid-19 till now.

The medical fraternity in China still continues to remember and honour this man but this is as far as it has gotten. My friends and I are bemused that Wu Lien-Teh has been largely overlooked in the country of his birth and death. Surely he deserved more than just three roads in George Town and Ipoh named after him? We formed the Dr Wu Lien-Teh Society in Penang in 2012 in order to perpetuate his memory. We were on a slow auto-pilot in the past few years but thankfully, there is now more awareness for this heroic Son of Penang.

In these unprecedented times, Wu Lien-Teh's name is cropping up more often as more people begin to uncover and appreciate him. But apart from China and Malaysia, perhaps also Singapore, the Wu Lien-Teh story still appears untold. Last month though, there was this online news story from the Fast Company magazine that traced the N95 mask back to Wu. And two days ago, the Cable News Network (CNN) had a story about the Great Manchurian Plague and gave prominence to the role played by him. "In Harbin, the Chinese authorities' lead doctor Wu Lien-teh, a Malaysia-born ethnic-Chinese medic educated at Cambridge University, was managing to contain the outbreak," said the story. Of course, back in 1911 there was no Malaysia then. Only the Straits Settlements. But I bet this would have left CNN's readers confused.

On another matter, an old school friend brought a story to my attention yesterday. An article that had appeared in The Straits Times of Singapore. The story wasn't about Wu Lien-Teh though. It was about his grand-nephew who had isolated the Asian Flu virus in 1957. Although I've written about Dr Lim Kok Ann last month, I still think the Straits Times story is a good supplement to my story. Here's the story from the newspaper:

The man who isolated Asian flu virus with help of eggs
APR 19, 2020, 5:00 AM SGT
Valerie Tay 

As a young girl, Stella Kon accompanied her father, the late Professor Lim Kok Ann, to his workplace.

There, in a darkened laboratory in the microbiology department of the College of Medicine Building in Singapore General Hospital, she would hold up a single chicken egg to a bright, stark light.

Under it, the 13-year-old was able to see through the shell and look for any movement of the chick embryo.

This process, called candling, allowed her to check if the embryos of incubated eggs were still alive after being infected with a new strain of flu.

To read the full story, please click here. Note that you may need to register with the website. But it's free.