 Lasting peace built on justice and understanding among nations, this is the objective of the United Nations. This is another program in the United Nations series of the Pacific story, one of the five special series presented by the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated stations to further world unity and world peace through understanding. For hundreds of years, the Pacific and the lands it touches have been the scene of struggle, conflict for gain and power, people against people and the millions caught in the political and economic crosscurrents. Today, with most of the world's population concentrated around and in the Pacific, the events of the Pacific are a vital world concern. The Pacific story dedicates this series to the objective of the United Nations. Lasting peace built on justice and understanding among nations. Medicine comes to China. 110, Dr. Bentz. Take the scalpel. Yes, Dr. Bentz. Sponges. One, two, three, four. Sucher. And more light. Yes, Dr. Bentz. But the oil is running very low. Are there any more wounded? No, Dr. The village carriers have brought in all the wounded they could find. When it is daylight, there will be more. This was a brigade hospital on the Chinese front in 1945. I called my assistant for scalpels, sponges, sutures, but they were only symbols. Scalples were ground from old bayonets. Sponges were wards of homegrown cotton. And the sutures were made of local sheep gut. I didn't call for anesthetics. There were none. It was very kind of you, Dr. Bentz, to permit yourself to be impressed into service in our brigade hospital when you are on such an important mission. As a former medical student of yours, I hope I have not taken too great an advantage of you. Dr. Cheng Wu was the only qualified doctor assigned to this brigade. The hospital was located in a series of caves, seemingly the only places of safety from Japanese dive bombers. I must confess, Dr. Bentz, that I had another objective in asking you to assist in surgery. Knowing you are on tour of inspection for the missionary board of my old Amamata, I wish you to learn at first hand under what primitive conditions we must operate. Will you have another cup of tea, doctor? It is cold and damp in the caves tonight. As I looked at the war-hardened face of Cheng Wu, the doctor in a dim yellow lantern light, I thought back nine years to Cheng Wu, the earnest medical student. What do you plan to do, Cheng Wu, when you graduate next year? I'm afraid you may think me foolish, Dr. Bentz. I'm going back to my village. You aren't going to practice in Beiping or in Shanghai? No, Dr. Bentz. I wish to practice in my own village, where there has never been a doctor practicing western medicine. But only for a year or two will I do that. I'm not at all disappointed, but I'd like to know why. I have thought it all out. I am going to teach, not practice medicine. Teach? Yes. Teach the doctors who will eventually serve my people. There are 450 millions of us Chinese and less than 6,000 doctors. That is less than one doctor for 70,000 people. We need at least 225,000 physicians in China. Can our few medical colleges turn them out? No, they can't. But many of your people reject western medicine. That is why I return to my village. There I will learn how my people can be taught to accept the scientific approach to disease. Then I will devote myself to teaching the doctors of the new China. But Cheng Wu was not destined to return to his village. Scarcely he graduated them swiftly like a summer storm. The distant cloud of Japanese aggression swept down upon Beiping. I was about to seek the safety of the American embassy. Dr. Bentz! Dr. Bentz, quickly! This is Cheng Wu! Cheng Wu, what are you doing out of the streets? The Japanese are already in the city, Dr. Bentz. You should have left long ago. There is work to do at the hospital. I want you to help me rescue medical supplies, surgical instruments and microscopes from the hospital. They must not fall into Japanese hands. But we couldn't get them out of Beiping. The city is almost surrounded. I have that all arranged, doctor. There are 10 willing car drivers who can still leave by the Dragon Gate. We must save as much of the equipment of the medical colleges as we can. For when this war envelops all of China, nothing will be so difficult to secure as medical supplies. If you think there's a chance of making it. We must try, Dr. Bentz. But your help is essential to instruct the car drivers what must be taken and how it must be packed. That was my escape from Beiping the night of August 8, 1937. The next day the Japanese took formal possession of the city. And now, eight years later, I was inspecting army medical facilities and the Chinese were still fighting the invaders. Down, Dr. Bentz! Down! We are on a reach and when the star shells go up, the Japanese can see us plainly silhouetted. This is the only approach to the receiving hospital. Be very quiet because the Jap snipers will shoot at the sound of our voices. Captain Fong was my guide to what was optimistically called a front line receiving hospital. We may continue now, doctor. It is located in the three small buildings at the edge of the village. The buildings were low hovels in which only a very short man could stand erect. It is safe now because we have crossed the ridge. I do not think the Japanese will attack tonight. We wanted you to witness the arrival of one of our muleback hospitals near the front. Captain Fong was speaking of the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps organized in 1937 by General Robert Koh Shang Lim. By 1945, there were 8,000 junior medical aides operating hundreds of mobile units traveling by mulebacks. In this building, you will see a typical receiving hospital where no Red Cross aid exists. Captain Fong, shut the door quickly, doctor Bent, so the enemy snipers will not be given a target. This is a shameful sight. It should not be dignified by the name of a hospital. However, you should understand that for centuries, warfare has been regarded in China as disgraceful. The trade of a soldier has contemptible. Men were lying on a dirt floor. There were no nurses, no attendants, only a guard. Not even water was available to ease the fever of the wounded. Kneeling beside one of them, I gave him a drink from my canteen. I told him that the Red Cross unit would soon be there. He could have been no more than 16 years old, seemed shrunken in his bloody uniform. It is good that the Red Cross is coming. I hear that they can do anything they want for the sake. They even bring the dead back to life. Maybe, maybe they can save my leg. To lose an arm is not so bad. But in China, a man needs his leg. As he talked, they examined his wound. A piece of shrapnel had fractured the thigh bone. Releasing the bandage, which had by now become a tourniquet almost covered by swelling flesh. I saw hopeless gangliness wound. The leg would be lost, and most likely, the life as well. I was wounded about four days ago. But my leg doesn't hurt very much anymore. You are the first doctor I have ever seen. In my village, there was one woman who had once gone to a doctor. But she had to travel many weeks to see him. There are no more than 6,000 doctors serving 450 million Chinese. Only half of these were in the Army Medical Club. When we kill all the Japanese, I will return to my village and tell the people what I have seen. I will say, we must have a doctor near our village. We must no longer give the children clothes tongues mixed with mud from the liver when they have the cholera nor burn incense to ensure a healthy baby. No. We must find a doctor who gives medicines like round balls that come to him in paper boxes and glass jars. We must find a doctor who can even breathe life into the stillborn. This is the spirit of New China. It will spread with the disbanding of armies and indomitable will seeking the gifts of science. The mobile hospital is approaching. You will want to see it. The snipers have retreated to their lines, for dawn is just breaking. It is quite safe to go outside. This mule train has been coming through with not too many casualties. Sometimes they are cut to pieces by the enemy. Captain Fong. I am Lieutenant Yat in command of the 53rd Red Cross Medical Relief Unit. You are badly needed. We have 300 wounded scattered in the village. Many were wounded as long as five days ago. We will set up at once. Have you selected quarters for us? The next building is the best, Lieutenant. What do you need first? The cleanup squad. Their equipment is on the first date mules. We'll prepare the building. Then we install rice mats for the wounded to lie upon. We will need a large bracer and charcoal so our surgical instruments may be sterilized. A small separate building if possible should be available for surgery. Unfortunately, we no longer have morphine or anesthetics. I'm afraid our work will be painful. The next night an engagement took place to the east. Firing lasted about two hours and then subsided. Shortly Captain Fong was in my quarters. It is kind of you, Dr. Bent, to tend this small scratch for me. It's slightly more than a scratch, Captain Fong. But luckily the bullet missed the bone and the arteries. At worst you'll have a very sore arm for a few weeks. I did not wish to bother Lieutenant Yat. It is not wise to speak of the price when one makes a gift. A gift? Yes. We learned of a Japanese field hospital unit nearby which was not too well got. My raid tonight has won a great many supply of drugs, anesthetics, and above all three complete kits of surgical instruments. Beautiful shining knives that are marked made in Germany. Lieutenant Yat will be very happy. I should think so. It cost the lives of six soldiers, one of whom was my nephew. But it will save the lives of perhaps a thousand Chinese. Here Dr. Bent is our spinning room. These medical students spend a portion of their time spinning thread. The cotton is grown by one of our agricultural cooperatives. But why should the students learn to spin, Dr. Lee? Because there are no bandages here. Therefore, we must spin the thread and weave the cloth before we may bind the wounds of our soldiers. I had no idea your supplies were such a low end. You shall learn, Dr. Bent. If you will come with me please. I wish you to meet Dr. Chu, professor of epidemiology. His class should be dismissed shortly. He will give you some indication of the scarcity of medical supplies. But here is his classroom. Your class will be over shortly. If it is correct, professor Chu, that a specific treatment has been found for cholera, why is it not adopted by the Army Medical Service? Have you read the article carefully? Oh, merely a brief of it, professor. The British Medical Journal in which the article appeared had been very poorly translated. I believe you will find that the prescribed treatment consists of solidizing tablets given by mouth, the use of blood plasma and saline injections. If you will search the facts, I am certain you will find no blood plasma in this province. There are, I believe, 17s of attire-soled tablets remaining, and they are dispensed only upon consultation of the entire medical staff. However, there is a sufficiency of salt from which you may secure the required saline solution. If present conditions continue, you will be a very old man, my dear scholar, before you are able to attempt this treatment. The class is dismissed. Tomorrow you shall all try to bring a flask of by-guards. Is the situation as bad as that? Worse, in the hospital across the valley, the entire stock of western drunks is kept in one drawer. You asked the students to bring flasks of by-guards. Isn't that whiskey? Yes. Due to the complete lack of formaldehyde for preserving our medical specimens, we must use whiskey. It works after a fashion. You will be interested, Dr. Chu, to know that our project for the manufacturer of plaster of Paris is succeeding. Shortly we will have sufficient for the setting of broken bones. One of my colleagues in Chongqing writes that his army medical unit is completely out of aspirin. Yet, had he the money, he could buy aspirin in a black market at $10 per tablet. Yes, I have heard that also. Of course, here we manufacture a substitute from Willow twigs. However, Dr. Bent, it is not that foreign aid does not reach us, but that the need is so great. The need has always been great in China. Famine, flood and war have for centuries prepared the soil for the flowering of disease. And among her gifts to the western world have been some of the great plagues of history. Communications with the flooded provinces of the Upper Yanxi River Valley remain broken. However, it is reported that a full-scale epidemic of cholera is raging in the wake of the receding waters. Over 10,000 have died of the disease. Cholera, long since controlled in most of the western world, is still common in the Orient. A quarter of a million cases of cholera at one time is not unusual. It could be more than a quarter of a million cases of cholera. It is the most difficult, even when peace comes to China, to wipe out cholera. To do this, we must educate our people to discard century-old customs, to adopt modern sanitary measures. However, the necessary sanitary measures cannot possibly be adopted until our economic standards are raised. Of what avail to ask our people not to live in houses of earthen floors when they do not have the money with which to buy planks? May I offer most favorable to my father that your eldest son has joined his ancestors? You should not have come to this house. It was the black death that took my son. Plague? The black death? I must warn the villagers. Run! Run for your lives! Bubonic plague is endemic to sections of outer Mongolia and from there spreads to all parts of the world. This is the result of ever-present plague among rats and other rodents. When the rat population in any part of the Orient has an incidence of one percent of plague, we expect an epidemic among man. The West has been able to erect a strong barrier between man and rat, resulting in no human epidemic of bubonic plague until the disease among rats has reached an incidence of two percent. Although a slim margin, the same worldwide epidemic, which in the early part of the 20th century killed over a million Indians and Chinese, resulted in only a few hundred deaths in the United States. Plague has spread from the Orient to the rats and ground squirrels of the Pacific Coast. Yet control measures, which include continuing surveys of the incidence of the disease among rats, along with the maintenance of a sanitary cordon between rat and man, successfully controls the spread of bubonic plague in the United States. The National Health Administration of China, before the Japanese invasion, conducted widespread war by poison upon rats. Yet we can hope only to minimize the effects of bubonic plague until the Chinese people are able to separate themselves, their homes and their food from rats. That means a complete economic reconstruction of the life of the average Chinese. In times of plenty, rats consume up to five percent of the food that man grows. But you must remember that in times of famine, rats provide a starvation diet for us. It is not only the long list of epidemic diseases such as smallpox, typhus, dysentery and sleeping sickness, but the dietary diseases such as scurvy, pelagra and berry berry, and the communicable diseases such as leprosy and tuberculosis, which can be controlled only by such economic reconstruction. The seeming futility of the problem I remembered well from the vaping medical college clinic before the Japanese came. You say, Dr. Bent, that my second son has tuberculosis? There's no longer any question. He must have complete bed rest and the food which is described in his pamphlet. Above all, he must be kept in a separate room, and the other members of your family must be kept out of that room. You will be shown by our nurse how to protect yourself from catching the disease. But, doctor, I am a rickshaw boy, and we have only one room in which to sleep and eat and raise five children. In the face of this futility, the Chinese have developed a long-range program geared to the low level of medical services, combining both preventive as well as curative medicine. To you, Wang Loh, and to the honor of your ancestors, the village of Bingdao presents these scrolls. So undeserving is this foolish one to warrant your observation. This is a new year celebration at which the village health worker is honored for his year of concern over the health of his people. You have shown us the wisdom of removing our well from the compound to a place in the field where the earth is sweet. These scrolls are the best way to protect ourselves where the earth is sweet. These scrolls are written upon red paper. It is an honor I am not fit to bear. You have vaccinated all but three of our villagers against the dread smallpox, and all of these three stupid ones already one has died of the disease. The kindness of our people may the smallpox vaccination possible. Even when your own rice was heavy with full heads, you continue to give two hours of each day to bind up our wounds. But I was aware that the iodine I put upon the wounds burned the body. Even so, it saved our children from mortification of the flesh, from the gangrene they preceded death, and from the horrors of locked jaw. This worthless person has been but a faithless guardian of the box of the 16 drugs which was entrusted unto him. You have anointed the eyes of those who in the old days became blind from trochoma, and miraculously they did not become blind. It is not I but the physician at the health station who trained me in its use who should be honored. You shall hereafter be known as a fellow scholar, and you have been elected to serve our village as health worker for another year. Under this system, the village health worker, whose annual wage consists of the honor and gratitude of his fellow men, is able to provide the skeleton of a future public health program at a cost of ten cents per person annually. The Chinese hoped to prevent what they consider the error of medicine in the United States, where the treatment of disease and preventive public health did not develop side by side but separately and at times in conflict with each other. Therefore, the frightful life in China must be waged simultaneously on four fronts. Against poverty, filth, ignorance, and disease. Today, United Nations relief is beginning to replace the emergency measures of such organizations as United China Relief, the American Red Cross, and Lend Lease. Throughout China, all men and public health officials are planning the best utilization of Western aid. Furthermore, it is time for China to use the help of the United Nations, not to alleviate an epidemic here or a famine there, but to establish the means within China, whereby we may solve our own public health problems. This is a district medical convention in Chongqing, small compared to giant U.S. medical gatherings. This one is attended by Orientals and Occidentals alike. We have made a survey of China's medical resources. In the United States, there was before the war one physician for each 800 persons. In China, there is one physician for each 70,000 persons. If we were to set a goal for one doctor for each 2,000 people at the present rate of training of physicians, it would take 450 years to produce sufficient doctors. We do not want permanent foreign relief as such in China, but we must seek aid in setting up the groundwork for a national health program which China may carry on alone in the future. What does China expect from United Nations relief? We want a program of public health which we can carry on when the United Nations organization is dissolved. We wish medical and health experts who can assist in setting up training centers. The volunteer health worker program must be expanded. There must be a public works program which will provide the power of inadequate sewage and water supply plants, a large percentage of which have been destroyed by the Japanese. From a United Nations executive comes the answer. Our surveys of medical requirements for China indicates that her minimum requirements include the establishment of 650 hospitals, 500 health centers, 10 epidemic control units and 400 maternity and infant welfare centers. There should be at least five modern pharmaceutical plants, four biological institutes and 13 hygiene laboratories. UNRA is shipping to China during the first half of 1946. 20,000 tons of medical supplies valued at nearly $25 million. Recruitment is underway to provide over 200 medical personnel for field operation. The aid seems inadequate in the face of the problem. A small number of doctors in China can dispense only a limited amount of drugs. And even over the importation of these there is disagreement in China. From this historic meeting of our two ancient guilds there shall develop a new protective force in our industry. This is a joint meeting of the pharmaceutical manufacturer's guild and the guild of surgical instrument makers. The importation of machine-made America drugs is destroying the profit in Chinese pharmaceuticals. We cannot compete with these products. This is a new twist on the old story of foreign cheap labor importations destroying the home market. That is correct. Our government should make the greatest possible use of Chinese-made medicines to encourage the development of our native pharmaceutical industry. That is true in the surgical instrument business also. Chinese doctors should be taught that foreign instruments foreign instruments should be banned. Our infant industries must be protected. We must appeal to the Ministry of Economic Affairs to stop this factor. Thus, in a land where drugs are so scarce they bring fabulous prices there is conflict over the basic elements of the sound public health policy. But however varied on one goal most of China is united she is determined to succeed in her age-old battle against pestilence and disease as well as famine, build and flood. You have been listening to the Pacific story presented by the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations to clarify events in the Pacific and to make understandable the cross-currents of life in the Pacific Basin with this Pacific story program send ten cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press Berkeley, California. May I repeat for a reprint of this Pacific story program send ten cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press Berkeley, California. The Pacific story is produced and directed by Arnold Marquess. The original musical score was composed and conducted by Arnold Marquess. The principal voice was that of Russell Thorson. Programs in this series of particular interest to servicemen and women are broadcast overseas to the worldwide facilities of the Armed Forces Radio Service. This program came from Hollywood. This is NBC, the National Broadcasting Company.