Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon Rachel Core Wayne Soon. Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020. ix + 312 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-1-5036-1400-0). Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic fixated the attention of armchair epidemiologists on China’s contributions to global health, scholars had begun to recenter China’s importance within global health histories.1 Wayne Soon’s recent volume contributes to this literature by highlighting the role of overseas Chinese—both within Asia and globally—in building biomedical care, education, [End Page 167] and institutions in Mainland China and Taiwan, especially during the 1937–45 war and postwar years. In particular, the book weaves together the contributions of three ethnic Chinese from Singapore and Malaysia. First, Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated physician from Penang, became a central figure in controlling the 1910–11 Manchurian Plague outbreak. Following the outbreak, Wu established the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service and convened an International Plague Conference, which brought foreign financial support for disease control. Second, the book examines the unsuccessful attempts of Lim Boon Keng to create a medical school at Xiamen University. Finally, most of the book focuses on Lim Boon Keng’s son, Robert Lim, who like his father, was born in Singapore and educated in Edinburgh. Robert Lim took lessons from his father’s experience, helped to diversify the Peking Union Medical College, and built successful biomedical institutions including: the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps (CRCMRC), blood banks, an Emergency Medical Services Training School (EMSTS), and the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC). While elites championed urban biomedical institutions in prewar China, Chapter 2 details how with financial and voluntary support from overseas Chinese, the CRCMRC adapted to local conditions in 1937–45 China. Specifically, Robert Lim led efforts to develop mobile medical units, which prioritized preventive medical interventions. Because “most soldiers suffered from diseases, rather than wounds,” the CRCMRC emphasized immunization, delousing to reduce scabies and relapsing fever, and improved nutrition (p. 63). As described in Chapter 3, Robert Lim used the priority of improved nutrition to incentivize donations to blood banks. Originally, few Chinese supported blood donation, believing it “would deplete their vitality”; however, Lim’s team offer of eggs and soymilk changed the calculus for would-be donors in wartime China (p. 96). In May 1938, Lim founded the EMSTS, which responded to the urgent need for medical providers by training military personnel in a three-month course. As Chapter 4 argues, the Chinese Communist Party would build upon the precedent of providing practical medical education after 1949; however, Robert Lim hoped the schools where the medics received basic training would evolve “to become comprehensive medical centers,” providing a six-year training course (p. 132). On this point, the leader of the United China Relief (UCR), a United States–based organization that funded the EMSTS, lambasted Lim, claiming that this aspiration was impractical. The exchange between Lim and URC illustrated the precariousness of relying on overseas donors, yet Lim was eventually able to build a more comprehensive medical training program. The final chapter illustrates how the NDMC—which had both vocational and academic tracks—was built in Shanghai after the war, and moved to Taiwan in 1948. This meticulous study is based upon research in more than twenty archives and libraries on three continents. In addition to re-centering the role of the Chinese diaspora in global health history, Soon follows both monetary donations and disagreements about how to best develop biomedicine across boundaries, both geopolitical and temporal. The book crosses the Taiwan Strait to examine Taiwan’s successful blood donation program and universal health care system as [End Page 168] legacies Robert Lim’s vision. The account also spans the 1949-divide in Mainland China, contributing to the growing body of scholarship highlighting continuities in medical care provision in the 1950s and beyond.2 Soon’s claim that the Chinese Communist Party “fostered a sense of wartime urgency,” allowing for biomedical expansion deserves explication in future scholarship, but his own contribution on the importance of wartime institutions to the development of biomedicine in China is...