Wu Liande Photos
Plague war
There have been three major outbreaks of plague in human history. The first started in 541 AD and broke out in the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire under the rule of Justinian the Great. The second time began in the 14th century and lasted for hundreds of years. It was also this pandemic. The plague was dubbed the terrifying name of "Black Death". The third time I came to China, starting in 1855, the climax period was India, Hong Kong in 1894, and Northeast China in 1910-1911.
In November 1910, a pneumonic plague was introduced to China from the Baikal region of Russia along the Middle East Railway, and it spread rapidly with Harbin as the center. Within 4 months, it spread to 5 provinces and 6 cities, with more than 60,000 deaths, of which only Harbin 5,272 people died in the city, and the corpses were everywhere, shocking the world. In December 1910, the Qing government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, You Cheng Shi Zhaoji, urgently called Wu Liande, who was the deputy supervisor of the Tianjin Army Military Medical School at the time, studied in the United Kingdom and obtained a doctorate of medicine from Cambridge University, to go to Harbin to investigate and deal with the plague.
In 1911, inns and schools closed in Harbin were used as offices, disinfection rooms and wards for epidemic prevention
Wu Liande and his assistants carefully investigated Fujiadian, where the outbreak was the most serious, and quickly found that the source of the plague came from a grassland marmot. Marmots are rodents that mainly live in Mongolia, Lake Baikal in Russia and northeastern China. They are small animals that live in dry and cold regions. Hunters who hunted marmots and merchants who sold otter skins were the first batch of infected people. The death rate of the first infected people was almost 100%, and the inn where they gathered was the initial and high-incidence area.
If the source of infection is found, then only the Yersinia pestis needs to be found in the deceased and the marmot, and the disease can be identified. Wu Liande and his assistants dissected the body of a Japanese inn hostess who was married to a Chinese. In the society at that time, this kind of thing was considered to be an unruly thing, but it was also compelling.
In a local slum, Wu Liande performed the first human anatomy in the history of a Chinese doctor and obtained important organs and blood samples. A few days later, Wu Liande found a large number of Yersinia pestis in the specimens through a microscope, which made it more certain that the epidemic was pneumonic plague. The way of transmission is directly through breathing and droplets between people, rather than indirectly from mice to fleas and then to people.
Wu Liande believes that to cut off the route of transmission, it is wise to isolate people infected with pneumonic plague from healthy people to avoid droplet infection caused by patients' coughing and spitting.
At the time of the New Year, there were many people returning home for the New Year. In order to prevent the spread of the epidemic, Wu Liande proposed preliminary epidemic prevention measures, controlled railway and road traffic, set up quarantine areas, and recruited doctors from within the customs. He even organized a large transportation team. Mobilize service personnel from all walks of life to join the epidemic prevention activities together. In particular, all public facilities in Fujiadian, hotels, restaurants, and shops, are fully disinfected, patients and their families are strictly isolated, and cremation measures are taken for sources of infection such as corpses.
At the same time, in order to prevent droplet infection, he also designed and invented a double-layer gauze mask to isolate patients. Later, this mask was called the "Wu's Mask".
The method of making this kind of mask is very simple. It uses general surgical gauze sold in pharmacies. It is about 9 inches wide and cut into 3 feet long. Each piece is folded into double layers along the length, and a piece is 4 inches long, 6 inches wide and half thick. Cut each end of the gauze into two pieces, each 15 inches long, to make it into a two-layer gauze bandage. Use the cotton in the middle to cover the mouth and nose, and the upper tail at both ends must pass over the ears. It is tied to the back of the head, and so does the lower tail at both ends, but it must pass under the ears.
At the beginning of the design, Wu Liande designed the mask with three straps at each end, the upper two tied along the top of the ears behind the head, the middle two tied below the ears behind the neck, and the lower two tied upwards on the top of the head. For ease of use, the strap will be simplified into two soon, but the protective effect remains. Such self-made masks are simple and easy to wear, and the price is low, each only costs half and a half of the national currency. Wu Liande mobilized a lot of manpower and material resources to ensure that the masks are continuously supplied to the public, and they are quickly accepted by the public.
Under Wu Liande's organization, in less than four months, this unseen plague was finally brought to an end. This was also the first large-scale successful control of infectious diseases in human history. Wu Liande contributed a lot. Later, Wu Liande said in his autobiography that "epidemic prevention is no less than a war." Undoubtedly, he won the war against the plague.
Famous
At the "World Plague Research Conference" held in 1911, this convenient and practical mask was appreciated by medical experts from all over the world. "The mask invented by Wu Liande is simple in style and light in manufacturing, but it is also very effective. good."
Because of "outstanding achievements in the practice and research of pneumonic plague control and the discovery of the role of marmots in its spread," Wu Liande was nominated as a candidate for the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The candidate's confidentiality period is 50 years. The news was officially disclosed on the official website of the Nobel Foundation in 2007. He is the first person in the Chinese world.