Wu Lien-teh

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Lore & Background

Wu Lien-teh was born in Penang, one of the three towns of the Straits Settlements, to a Hoisanese father and a Hakka mother. He won the Queen's Scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1896, becoming the first medical student of Chinese descent at Cambridge. His undergraduate clinical years were spent at St Mary's Hospital, London, and he continued his studies at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (under Sir Ronald Ross), the Pasteur Institute, Halle University, and the Selangor Institute. He returned to the Straits Settlements in 1903, married Ruth Shu-chiung Huang, and moved to China in 1907. In the winter of 1910, Wu was instructed by the Foreign Office of the Imperial Qing court to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease that killed 99.9% of its victims — the beginning of the large pneumonic plague epidemic of Manchuria and Mongolia, which ultimately claimed 60,000 lives. He conducted a postmortem on a Japanese woman who had died of the plague, determined via autopsy that the plague was spreading by air, and invented the face mask that became the precursor of the N95 respirator. He initiated quarantine, arranged for buildings to be disinfected, and had the old plague hospital burned down and replaced. He asked for imperial sanction to cremate plague victims, soaking bodies in paraffin and burning them on pyres — the turning point of the epidemic. He chaired the International Plague Conference in Mukden in April 1911, a historic event attended by scientists from the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Mexico, and China. He later presented a plague research paper at the International Congress of Medicine, London in August 1911, published in The Lancet.

Reader's Guide

Wu Lien-teh's significance lies in his pioneering public health measures during the Manchurian plague of 1910–11, which included the invention of the Wu mask, a forerunner of the N95 respirator. His insistence on cremation of infected bodies — impossible to bury because the ground was frozen — was a turning point; days after cremations began, plague began to decline and within months it had been eradicated. He also chaired the International Plague Conference in 1911, bringing together scientists from multiple nations. Beyond the plague, Wu led efforts to combat the 1920-21 cholera pandemic in the north-east of China, served as first director of the Manchurian Plague Service and the National Quarantine Service, and was a founder and first president of the Chinese Medical Association (1916–1920). His legacy includes the Wu Lien-teh Collection of 20,000 books donated to Nanyang University, the Dr. Wu Lien-teh Society in Penang, and the Wu Lien-Teh Institute at Harbin Medical University (opened 2015). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1935, the first Malayan to receive such recognition.

Did You Know?

• Wu was the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at the University of Cambridge, admitted in 1896 after winning the Queen's Scholarship.
• During the Manchurian plague, Wu conducted a postmortem on a Japanese woman — an act usually not accepted in China at the time — and determined the plague spread by air.
• French doctor Gérald Mesny, who came to replace Wu, refused to wear the mask and died days later of the plague.
• Wu oversaw the production and distribution of 60,000 masks in a later epidemic.
• In 1943, Wu was captured by Malayan left-wing resistance fighters and held for ransom, then nearly prosecuted by the Japanese for supporting the resistance by paying the ransom, but was protected by having treated a Japanese officer.