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3 The Introduction o/Western Medical Education THE READER has to remember that, at the period of time which we have so far considered, the science of medicine as we understand it today was in its infancy and even the medical education which Colledge and Parker, Hobson and Lockhart had undergone was relatively primitive by comparison even with that which the College of Medicine was to introduce towards the end of the century. The great advances in medical science were largely yet to come and with those advances came the fundamentals of modern scientific medical education as we know it today. Some historical background to the emergence of a medical school in Hong Kong should now set the scene. For some considerable time before the signing of the Treaty of Nanking between Great Britain and China in 1842, foreigners in China had been confined to Canton and Macau. By that Treaty, not only was the island of Hong Kong ceded to the British Crown but the five 'Treaty Ports' of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were opened first to the British and speedily thereafter to Americans, French and other foreigners. Whilst the missionaries who followed the traders saw Hong Kong as a departure platform for China as a whole, the missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, British and American and others, readily adopted Hong Kong as a field as well as a base for their missionary endeavours. Schools naturally formed an important part of their evangelisation but it was the opening in Hong Kong of the Government Central School, later to become Queen's College, which was perhaps the most important event in Hong Kong's early educational history because it was through the medium of this school that a new elite of Western educated Chinese was to emerge, providing not only a new class in Hong Kong society as a whole, able to communicate in the English language with the colonial government, which was largely unable to communicate with them in the Chinese language, but also a cadre able to advance to another level of Western education. Thus, it was inevitable that pressure to provide education to what we would now call tertiary level made itself felt and an early suggestion was the elevation of Queen's 24 Constancy ofPurpose College to post-secondary status. But such ideas came to nothing largely because the aims and objectives were never clear. But with medical education it was very different. In the years leading to the foundation of the Hong Kong College of Medicine in 1887, there were a number of endeavours in China itself which should be noted though most of them came to little if anything at all. In 1879, graduates of the True Light Middle School at Canton were receiving medical training at the Medical Missionary Hospital there whilst in 1881, W.H.Boone in Shanghai, in 1883, Walter R. Lambuth and William H. Park in Soochow, in 1883 D.D. Main in Hangchow and John Kerr in Canton (under whom Sun Yat-sen started his medical studies in 1886 before coming to the new College of Medicine in Hong Kong in 1887) initiated some form of medical training for Chinese students. Sir Patrick Manson, later to loom large in the foundation of the Hong Kong College of Medicine, had also introduced medical education into Taiwan while in the employ of the Imperial Maritime Customs. But, as Professor Gerald Choa has pointed out, these early efforts were more directed at training assistants rather than producing fully qualified practitioners who might one day practise (and teach) in their own right. The Convention of Peking 1860, which not only brought to an end the second 'Opium War' between Great Britain and China (better known as the 'Arrow War'), had a profound effect on a number of influential Chinese and China's move towards modernization was largely inspired by the traumatic psychological effect of the events leading to the signing of that treaty. One particularly significant result of this war was the opening of formal diplomatic relations between Great Britain and China which smoothed the way for Western educators to enter China. Manifestations of the new spirit in China may be found in the opening of the T'ung Wen Kuang at Peking as early as 1864 and, some years later, the foundation under the patronage of Li Hung Chang, the 'Bismarck of China', of a medical school named the Pei Yang Medical College. To the latter went a significant number of...

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