Then every year...
1904 4500 cases 3574 died (mortality
rate about 75%)
Then every year gradually diminishing...
Until 1917 7 cases 7 died
No more cases after 1917.
That was a triumph through hygiene and rat control.
I was working in a hospital in South
Fukien from 1940 to 1946. For 3 succesive years 1942,
1943, & 1944 cases of bubonic plague occurred
in the late spring of each year and were admitted
to hospital - about For reasons of trade and kinship
there was always much coming and going across the
straits between Fukien and Taiwan. The Japanese were
highly sensitive about quarantine regulations towards
incoming ships and junks.
(b) Hospital Construction. Ten well-built,
well-staffed, adequately equipped hospitals were built,
one in each large city – light, clean, airy and earthquake
proof. A large Central government hospital was built
in Taipei, completed in 1897. In 1899 a medical college
was started in connection with this hospital. The
first Taiwanese medical students graduated in 1902.
The medical college continued to evolved into the
faculty of medicine of the Taipei Imperial University
in 1936. At the end of the Japanese era, 1,888 Taiwanese
students had graduated from this one and only medical
college in the island.
The Japanese commitment to scientific
medicine was total. Bacteriologists, pathologist,
specialists in all branches of clinical medicine,
all highly trained in Japan, contributed to the total
medial care programme, to teaching and to research.
The Formosan Medical Association (retaining the classical
name "Formosa") was formed in 1902. The
first issue of the Journal of the Formosan Medical
Association appeared in the same year. Of course increasing
numbers of Taiwanese graduate doctors played a part
in these services.
(c) My third example is the management
of opium addiction.
Opium smoking had, presumably, been
brought from the mainland of China by the emigrants
and was widely practiced, especially amongst the wealthier
classes. Dr. Myers, one of the community doctors in
Taiwan observed that, in time, it brings "decaying
of the mind an d enfeeblement of the body".
