The Reading Warehouse

One of the great narratives of the last century is the rise of China on the world stage. The advance of medical sciences has played a pivotal role in this process, through vastly improving the health of China's people. This achievement was facilitated by the many Chinese medical educators who brought western medicine to their homeland in the early 1900s and educated thousands of Chinese youth to be medical doctors in the Nationalist era. To this date, almost all published material about the history of the development western medicine in China focused on a particular time period, specific medical fields, or certain medical institutes. But also of vital importance were the people who worked to make it happen. Without their extraordinary efforts, the development of Western medicine in China couldn't have been sustained though the tumultuous periods of war and the complicated politics leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Dr. Chung Un Lee is one of those Chinese medical educators who played an important role. He started working in the Department of Medicine at PUMC in 1923, after he finished his medical training in England. Over the next fourteen years he rose from an Assistant in Medicine to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1937, when the war broke out between China and Japan, Dr. Lee left PUMC for Southwest China and founded the National Kweiyang Medical College to contribute to the resistance effort. Over those eight difficult years, he helped educate thousands of doctors, nurses, and health professionals who later became the foundation of medical education and the health care system in southwest China. Because of his integrity and experience, Dr. Lee was selected by the PUMC Trustees to be their new Director on March 12, 1947, and took the lead in reopening PUMC after the war. With financial support from the China Medical Board, he reorganized faculties, staffs, and students during the difficult post-war chaos. PUMC was reopened in October of 1948, and quickly returned its academic standards back towards pre-war levels.

Dr. Lee's career was abruptly interrupted after 1949 and he was labelled a "Rightest" by the communists in 1957 and demoted to Yunnan Province where he died in 1962. Since that time, his name and his accomplishments were purposefully forgotten. Very few at PUMC today have even heard of Dr. Chung Un Lee, president for 10 of its 100 year history and the first one who was Chinese. There is little information about the reopening of PUMC in 1947, which has rebuilt its foundation to become the best medical school in China today. These facts have never been recorded, partly because studying the original archives and published materials requires a dedicated scholar who is well versed in English and Chinese and also has an excellent knowledge of medicine. This is a daunting task. As time passes on, it becomes more urgent to document these important records of the development of medical education at this pivotal turning point in Chinese history.