"Early Days Of Western Medicine In China". In: Journal Of The North-China Branch Of The Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. Lxii. Wu, Lien-Teh.

First appearance in print of this historical essay by Wu Lien-teh (1879-1960), the physician who spearheaded wearing masks and self-isolating as tools of public health management. In 1935, he became the first Chinese doctor to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and his contributions to global epidemiology were celebrated in the Google Doodle for 10 March 2021. This essay anticipates Wu's wider contributions to the comprehensive history of Chinese medicine that he published with Wong K. Chimin in China in 1932. By this point in his career, he was firmly established as Republican China's authority on the containment of infectious diseases. Having studied at Cambridge in the 1890s, he returned to China in time to be on the front line of the fight against the 1910-11 plague in north-eastern China. In the face of scepticism from foreign doctors, he argued that disease could be spread by respiratory droplets and introduced self-isolation and the wearing of cotton and gauze masks. These strategies quickly became standard tools and were used to "flatten the curve" during the 1918 global flu pandemic. In 1930, he was appointed director of the National Quarantine Service. Concurrent to his medical research, Wu was an active member of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and he is named in the society's 1931-32 list of officers bound opposite the contents page. Volumes of the society's journal are now uncommon in commerce. Octavo, pp. 1-31 within the journal. Original blue wrappers, covers lettered in black. Covers lightly soiled, front wrapper and first few leaves a little creased at head, contents clean: a very good copy.