Show description

35 These were early stirrings of a fundamental premise of public health research, namely collection of vital statistics as a guide to policy. 36 The Argument It is the thesis of this book that several important initiatives took place during the era under study that did address the waste of life apparent to reformers of that era, and that these efforts were significantly extended during wartime conditions. We will find that many thousands of country people were trained in basic methods of triage and disease prevention, and that a strong focus on advancement of hygiene and prevention of epidemic disease emerged as the healthcare reformers took stock of what their options were.

Lau and Howard Goldblatt (1995), 35–43. 16 Tina Phillips Johnson (2011), chapter 2, provides a groundbreaking treatment of this subject. 17 An appalling example is the case of Wang Yiwei, cited by Wang Zheng. Wang was accused as an infant of having a hard fate that ‘ate up’ (killed) her four-year old brother. This had a permanently negative impact on her life and the life of her family. See Wang Zheng (1999), 222–223. epidemics, wars and public healthcare advocacy 21 Epidemic Disease and Public Healthcare up to 1928 Not long after the 1911 revolution a handful of Chinese health care reformers, most of them educated overseas, began to articulate a modern, sciencebased, healthcare policy for China.

The National AntiOpium Association, founded in 1924, felt its hands tied. 52 An unnamed correspondent bleakly summed up the health environment as follows. The defunct Peking government had merely codified sanitary laws, most of which had never been put into operation. China’s death rate was probably “not under 30 per 1,000,” double that of the West. e. twelve million deaths instead of six million). Struck by this terrible waste of life, the writer blasted the medical profession as being full of half-trained doctors, many graduated from incompetent provincial medical schools.