In 1910, Northern China was the scene of an outbreak of plague (瘟疫). Many medical workers were also sick or died from the disease. Dr Wu Lien-tch, who had lived in China since 1908, was sent to the area and proved important in helping to stop the disease and prepare the way for Western-style public health medicine in China.
He is praised for asking the local government to burn the big number of dead bodies. Both measures had never been seen in China. He was also praised by different organizations for setting up sanitary (卫生) services to prevent a repeat of the disaster.
Wu chaired the first international scientific meeting held in China, making Chinese scientists members of the international scientific community. Later, the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service was set up with Wu as its director.
Wu was nominated (提名) for the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1935. By 1937, Wu returned to his birth place Malaya as it was then known, to practice medicine, in the northern town of Ipoh, where he treated the poor for free.
Born in 1879 on Penang Island, Wu showed considerable talent (才能) at a young age. He went to Penang Free School, one of Malaya's earliest schools, and won a chance to go to Emmanuel College at Cambridge University where he behaved very well, winning several prizes in the process.
Wu gave generously to organizations of learning, giving away money, books and works of art he collected while in China. He also had a sense of the importance of his own work, setting down his life's work in an autobiography (自传) named Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician, which came out in 1859. Wu died a year later in Penang at the age of 81.
