China Doctor

A backwash of postwar epidemics spread across China, carried by 60,000,000 louse-ridden refugees. Two months ahead of the virulent summer season, a cholera epidemic broke in Canton. Only cool weather prevented a full-scale epidemic in Hankow. Bubonic plague broke out in Foochow, and in north China was apparently moving on Peiping and Tientsin. Two planes carrying UNRRA medical supplies flew to Tientsin to meet the threat.

In all Canton, a city of nearly 1,000,000, there was only one foreign doctor to fight the epidemic: Frank H. Herrington, who resigned from the U.S. Navy last fall to join UNRRA. He diagnosed 162 cases of cholera, watched the fatality rate climb to 50%. Canton lacked cholera vaccine, the distilled water and apparatus to give intravenous saline solutions as part of the prescribed treatment for cholera patients.

Faced with this crisis, Herrington flew to Shanghai, wangled 200,000 doses of cholera vaccine from UNRRA supplies and local labs. Additional vaccine for 1,000,000 persons was promised, planes chartered to speed chlorine for Canton's polluted water system. Unless the anti-epidemic supplies arrived promptly, Herrington estimated that more than 1,000 Cantonese would die of cholera in the next few weeks. It was not his first bout with cholera. Last summer, while surgeon for the U.S. Embassy in Chungking, he had helped to stop a cholera epidemic in China's temporary capital.

Living Legend. At 41, Frank Herrington, a hefty (198 lbs.), lighthearted medic, is a famed old China hand. When Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times was in Chungking, he described Herrington's reputation as "stupendous." Like many a U.S. country doctor, Herrington ministered to rich & poor alike; paid for treatment of a ricksha boy out of his own pocket, carried a gold watch inscribed

"To our good friend, in gratitude," from Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek.

Herrington likes to say that he was "born in China" because his family used to spend their summer vacations at China Lake, Me., near his birthplace of Monmouth. While still a medical student at McGill University, Montreal, he married and sired two sons, later worked as a night clerk in a Manhattan hotel to help pay his way through New York University. A classmate claims that he "slept through every damn lecture. . . ."

But Frank Herrington was wide awake last week. Observers agreed that his contribution to Sino-American relations in the past three years has been priceless. Back in the U.S., his wife was "fairly sure" that he would not take up his old practice again in Middletown, N.Y. (pop. 22,000); he had already written to ask her how she would like to settle down in Shanghai.

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