Bridge between Nations

DOCTORS EAST, DOCTORS WEST (278 pp.) --Edward H.Hume, M.D.--Norton ($3).

Snake meat was good for rheumatism, otter's liver for tuberculosis. For sore eyes, a fine salve could be made from bears' gall bladders. If dubious of such tried-&-true remedies, the ailing one shuffled down the street to get a heavenly diagnosis from an astrologer, or spiritual advice from one of the local fortune tellers. There was not much point, said the Chinese, in a foreign doctor coming to Changsha to open a foreign-style hospital.

But young Dr. Edward Hume, of Yale and Johns Hopkins, had been sent to Hunan Province to do just that. He opened his dispensary on one of Chang-sha's main streets in November 1906. It was not much of a place to look at--four whitewashed rooms in what had been an old inn. The original staff consisted merely of a gatekeeper, a janitor and the doctor. They hung out a black-and-gold lacquered sign reading Yali I Yuan (Yale Court of Medicine), and patients began to drift in. Yali I Yuan was the first Yale-in-China medical unit, forerunner of Hsiang Ya ("Hsiang" for Hunan, "Ya" for Yale) Hospital and Medical School.

Dr. Hume eventually became president of Hsiang Ya, helped to bring a new kind of medicine to China, also learned that China's ancient medical traditions had "unsuspected values" in terms of human nature and the psychological causes of disease. Medicine, he knows, can be "a builder of bridges between nations and cultures."

Dr. Hume's account of his years in China, which won the $3,500 Norton Medical Award for 1946, is sketchy and unpretentious, but full of anecdote and East-West contrasts. Hunan 40 years ago had only recently admitted foreigners, and even substantial citizens still clung to their old ways. According to Chinese medical lore, the pulses were of prime importance in diagnosis--both the right and the left pulse, tested at three points on each wrist, each point revealing the condition of a particular organ. A freshly killed rooster helped to drive away fever. At time of childbirth, opened doors, cupboards and trunks helped to keep the birth canal open. A respectable lady did not allow a male doctor to examine her person. Hidden behind the bed curtains, she extended first one wrist, then the other, handed out an ivory female figurine marked with the place where the pain was located.

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