In the winter of 1910, Dr. Wu Lien-Teh stepped off a train in the northern Chinese city of Harbin. He was there to solve a medical mystery, at great personal risk. Over the past few months, an unknown disease had swept along the railways of northeast China, killing 99.9% of its victims. The Qing Imperial court had sent the Cambridge-educated Dr. Wu north to stop the epidemic.
When Dr Wu arrived in Harbin on Christmas Eve, 1910, he carried little in the way of medical instruments and had only one assistant. One of Wu' s first acts upon arrival was to set up special quarantine (隔离) units and to order lockdowns to stop infected persons from traveling and spreading the disease. He had teams check households for possible cases, and even managed to convince authorities to completely close the railways in the early weeks of 1911. Of particular concern was the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday, which had become a great annual migration of people traveling across the country to see their families.
Thanks to Dr. Wu's efforts, the number of plague victims began to die down, and by March 1, 1911, the epidemic was fully contained. The pneumonic (肺炎的) plague outbreak of 1910-1911 lasted nearly four months, affected five provinces and six major cities, and accounted for over 60,000 deaths. It is clear that without the brave and decisive actions taken by Dr. Wu, it could have been much worse. Had the epidemic gone unchecked, allowing holiday rail passengers to spread the disease to the rest of China could have meant a catastrophic loss of life and possibly a global health crisis.
In April 1911, Dr. Wu chaired an International Plague Conference in Shenyang, attended by scientists from 11 counties including the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan and France. They praised Dr. Wu for his handling of the 1910-1911 outbreak. For a time, Dr. Wu was the world's most famous plague fighter, a title be defended in a malaria epidemic in China in 1919, and a return of plague in 1921.
