In 2013, Mohd Nasarudin Mohd Yusof created quite a stir in a nation hungry for international recognition by being on the stage when Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, received their Nobel Prize. According to the TRP website, he was "awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for his team’s extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons”. Without taking away anything from the contribution of En Nasarudin or to start a debate over whose contribution was the greater, I would like to share about the only Malaysian who was personally nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Dr Wu Lien Teh was born in Penang in 1879. He got his medical degree in Cambridge under the Queen's scholarship: Queen Victoria that is, not Queen Elizabeth II. After a time studying in various institutes after graduation, much of which were under scholarships and for which he ended up with awards, the new;y qualified Dr Wu returned to Malaya and married into a family progressive public health activists. It was in those circles, he developed his ideas on the role of public health in society when public health was still just an emerging branch of medical science.
After a period of medical research, private practice and some anti-opium social work, he was offered a senior position to train doctors for the Chinese Army. He was then just 31. He gladly accepted the position as he was unable to progress much in his career with the positions that his many qualifications qualified him for at that time being closed to non-British. China was then in turmoil in the final year of the Ching Dynasty, racing against time to modernise the country.
It wasn't long after his arrival in 1910 that a pneumonic plague broke out in Manchuria. After some research (and the research wasn't easy as autopsies were resisted in Chinese culture on the grounds that the body must be buried whole), he identified the nature of the disease and how it spread. Armed with this understanding, he instituted public health initiatives to contain the disease.. This involved disinfecting buildings where people were infected and quarantining those who were infected to prevent the spread of the disease. He also developed a mask for daily use that became known as a Wu mask.
The turning point came when he obtained an imperial directive to burn infected bodies, which though going against the Chinese culture of the day, finally stemmed the spread of the plague and eventually ending it in 1911 after an outbreak of just three months. He presented his findings to an international conference later that year and probably had quite a lot of influence on the methods used to combat the global flu outbreak of 1919-20.
For his efforts, Dr Wu received awards from the Czar of Russia and the President of France in addition to academic recognitions from universities in US, Japan and Hong Kong, including an honorary doctorate from the John Hopkins University, which publishes worldwide Covid-19 statistics today.. He was the founder of the Medical Association in China and sat on various committees in the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.
He returned to Malaya in time for the Japanese invasion, where his treatment of of a Japanese army officer saved him from internment. He opened a private clinic in Ipoh, which I was told was near where the current Durbar restaurant is, at the FMS building opposite the Dataran. Dr Wu lived to see an independent Malaya, dying in Penang in 1960 and leaving behind a family full of doctors, enough to run a video conference of his medical descendants all over the world in 2021..
The peak recognition for Dr Wu came in 1935, when he was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Medicine, being the first person of Chinese descent as well as the first and so far the only Malaysian to be nominated for a Nobel prize. While there has long been a statue of Dr Wu in Harbin China as well as a number of other recognitions, a bust of Dr Wu was finally unveiled in Penang in 2016 from a private initiative by the Wu Lien Teh Society. The bust was homeless for a while before a location was finally offered by the Penang State government on the grounds of the Penang Institute.
There is also a road in Ipoh and a residential estate in Penang named after him. Other than the provision of the grounds for the bust in the Penang Institute by the Penang State Government, there seems to be little commemoration of such a pivotal Malaysian by Malaysian governments.
If the many of the measures he took to combat the Manchurian plague sounds familiar to us a century later, it is because these are the same measures we are using to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Dr Wu's contribution was remembered in much of the world with a Google Doodle to celebrate his birthday in 2021. New York Times published an article about the man who invented the mask we all used today. A children's book about Dr Wu will be published soon and it is a book we hope to use to tell to our daughter about the story of the Malaysian who has contributed the most to world health. I hope Malaysians will be able to educate ourselves about Dr Wu the way the rest of the world remembers him and thank him for our health every time we put on our face masks during a pandemic. Google in its Doodle called him ‘the man behind the mask’: about time we unmask the man, first to Malaysians and to the world.
The next article is an in-depth look at the racial set-up in Malaya at a time When Malays became a minority.
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