Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon (review)

Wayne Soon's book on the rise of global medicine in China in the first half of the twentieth century addresses its lessons directly to the People's Republic of China in the midst of a global pandemic—transparency and global cooperation are key to coming to terms with a health crisis. Essentially a triple biography of three extraordinary transnational figures—Wu Lien-teh (1879–1960), Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wenqing 1869–1957), and Robert Lim (Lin Kesheng 1897–1969), each born of southern Chinese migrants to British-controlled Straits colonies of Singapore or Penang and educated at leading medical schools in Great Britain—Global Medicine in China argues that overseas Chinese were critical to the establishment of modern medicine in China.

These men, in addition to other overseas Chinese, built international networks that accomplished spectacular feats, most notably the blood bank that collected from more than 1,000 donors in New York, converted the blood to plasma, and then shipped the plasma across the Himalayas to "Free China" in the southwest. This was the first non-segregated blood bank including "Americans, Chinese, Negroes, Hindus, and Japanese," according to the New York Times. Yet as successful as the program seemed to be from the sending side, Soon reveals how recipients in China were reluctant, and when blood donors in China were needed, officials often had to resort to coercing undernourished Nationalist soldiers, many of whom had already been press-ganged into military service.

Global Medicine in China is a salutary addition to recent work on medical developments during the Sino-Japanese War by scholars like John Watt, Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, and Mary Augusta Brazelton, and like Brazelton's work, it also examines developments before and after the war. For the pre-war period, the book examines the public health work of Dr. Wu Lien-teh's anti-plague and epidemic work in Northeast China, as well as Lim Boon Keng's establishment of Xiamen University, which he had intended as a medical school but instead became an important center for the study of biology. More important was Lim's son, Robert Lim, who, like his father, studied at Edinburgh University but then went on to get a Ph.D. in physiology and negotiate his way into a position as head of the physiology department at the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College.

The rise of war with Japan in 1937 coincided with Wu Lien-teh's retreat to Penang to write his memoirs, while Robert Lim and a new set of diasporic Chinese became leading figures in establishing not only the blood bank described above, but also the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps, which included mobile medical units that emphasized preventive and dietary health care due to Lim's expertise in scientific studies of nutrition. Adaptation is a grand theme for Robert Lim's wartime work, which also included establishing the Emergency Medical Services Training School to fill the ranks of the Medical Relief Corps units, which predated the British equivalent by one year. Soon argues somewhat convincingly that these schools must be understood as predecessors to later Chinese programs that brought emergency and preventive healthcare to the Chinese masses, and he points out that Lim secured funding from overseas Chinese, further strengthening his overall argument about diasporic contributions to the development of biomedicine in China. Disagreements with American fundraisers over Lim's use of funds led to pressure for his ousting in 1943, but one wonders why Lim and his critics could not find a middle ground between a three-month program that left graduates ill-prepared and Lim's preferred six-year program, which his American opponents thought was unnecessary in China. After the war, Global Medicine in China shifts its focus to Taiwan, where Robert Lim resolved the issue by developing a two-track program: a six-year academic one and a four-year vocational program in a new organization, the National Defense Medical Center.

Global Medicine in China is largely...