Happy birthday to the man behind the mask, Dr. Wu Lien-teh!
The present Doodle commends the 142nd birthday of Chinese-Malaysian epidemiologist Dr. Wu Lien-teh. Wu Lien-teh, who designed a surgical face covering that is generally viewed as the precursor to the N95 mask.
Born into a family of Chinese immigrants in Penang, Malaya (current Malaysia) on this day in 1879, Wu went to turn into the first student of Chinese descent to earn his MD from Cambridge University. Following his doctoral studies, he accepted a position as the bad habit chief for China’s Imperial Army Medical College in 1908.
When an obscure pandemic tormented north-western China in 1910, the Chinese government appointed Wu to explore the disease, which he recognized as the highly contagious pneumonic plague that spread from one human to another through respiratory transmission.
To battle the disease, Wu designed and produced an special surgical mask with cotton and gauze, adding a few layers of material to channel inward breaths. He encouraged individuals to wear his recently concocted cover and worked with government authorities to set up quarantine stations and hospitals, restrict travel, and apply progressive sterilization techniques; his administration contributed extraordinarily to the furthest limit of the pandemic (known as the Manchurian plague) by April 1911—inside four months of being entrusted with controlling its spread.
In 1915, Wu founded the Chinese Medical Association, the nation’s biggest and most seasoned non-legislative clinical association.
In 1935, he was the main Malaysian—and the principal individual of Chinese drop designated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work to control the pneumonic plague. A committed backer and specialist of clinical headway, Wu’s endeavors changed general wellbeing in China as well as that of the whole world.
