DOCTORS IN CHINA.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18620, 16 July 1930, Page 6

DOCTORS IN CHINA.

NEW RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED. The attitude which China to-day is developing toward the medical profession illustrates the incongruous extremes so frequently found in that land during its present state of transition and upheaval (says the New Zealand Herald). The new tendency to hamper and restrict a doctor’s freedom is illustrated in a letter received here from the wife of a New Zealand medical missionary in China.

“There is a soldier in hospital just now, a mere boy about 15 years of age,” she writes. “The military authorities have been moving thousands of troops this week, and he fell from the train. Of course, the trains never stop for an incident like that, and he was carried to the hospital by some coolies who found him. He has a fractured skull and a broken foot, which will have to be amputated because gangrene has set in. One of the things dcotors in China now have to be most careful about is to secure full and adequate permission for every operation and every part of an operation.

“Every patient signs an agreement first. The reason for these precautions is that the clutches of the Chinese law are dangerously threatening, and a foreign doctor has not the security which he would enjoy at home. This year a German doctor in Canton was tried and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for carrying out a post-mortem without a relative's permission. He secured what he thought was adequate permission, but another relative made trouble. The sentence, owing to foreign agitation, was made conditional —a year's probation—so I suppose in this case it is only nominal. But the whole affair seemed rather ominous to the foreign doctors. “It seems strange that in this instance of the soldier, if the hospital let him die no one would bother, whereas if they amputated his leg without his permission (even though he was not in a state to give it) he could, when he regained health, make perhaps very serious trouble for the doctors and the hospital.” - iiis’iims m’Miiiiiii nm