From the South China Morning Post this week in: 1957
The University of Hong Kong was delighted to host as a guest speaker the world's 'most outstanding Chinese medical scientist', on whom it had conferred an honorary doctorate 41 years previously. Dr Wu Lien-teh was 'a well-known international plague expert' who had arrived in Hong Kong from Singapore on board the SS Chusan the previous day.
The report said Dr Wu, who was born in Penang in 1880, now had a private medical practice in Ipoh, in Malaysia's state of Perak, where he 'advocated the use of cremation' as a means of disposing of the dead, and 'through his initiation, had aroused much interest in the construction of a crematorium'.
Paying his first visit to Hong Kong in nine years, the 78-year-old addressed a capacity audience of students and professors on 'the most-significant aspect of his medical career - the 1910 Manchurian plague epidemic, which claimed 4,000 lives'.
Dr Wu also brought along 'a set of treasures' for the university - 'a set of books including his work on plague, an oil portrait of two rats, a human skull and a glass bottle ... and some pathological specimens. The latter included the tumour of a cock'.
Dr L.G. Kilborn, dean of the university's faculty of medicine, described these gifts as 'having extraordinary value and interest'.
After his lecture, Dr Wu recalled how he, his wife and two sons were just about to have Christmas dinner in 1910, when he received an urgent telegram from the imperial government, summoning him to Peking and then to Manchuria, 'where plague had broken out, killing many people'.