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W. A. REYNOLDS
Liu-Chi. The group we met were lively and interesting, many having been expelled from universities under Kuomintang control. Another evening we were invited to see a film at the American Army Observer Section which was established there under Colonel David Barrett in July 1944. There was also an invitation to mid-day meal with Marshal Chu Te. My memory is that there was not much conversation as Yu Chin-lung found him taciturn, my Chinese was inadequate, and the others were tongue-tied in the presence of the famous soldier. On leaving Yenan we were each presented with a warm woollen blanket of local manufacture (I still have mine) and I was given a painting, which I had uncautiously admired, by the Bureau chief of the Medical Service. I was also presented with a made-to-measure Army uniform complete with cap and badge.
Medical Work in the Border Region
The day after unloading we were taken to see the hospital named after Doctor Norman Bethune. Plate no. 17 shows the operating theatre. One of the famous 'three constantly read articles' of Chairman Mao Tse-tung is a eulogy of Bethune, delivered on December 21st 1939 soon after his death.
At the Bethune Memorial Hospital we were shown how supply difficulties had been overcome, including steel dental picks forged from railway line. We asked about medical supplies from the USSR since 1941 and were told that there had been some, perhaps five, plane loads (say 15 to 20 tons). The supplies we had brought included a portable X-ray with a petrol-driven generator.
The problems of civilian and military medical work in the Border Region are fully described by Margaret Stanley in a current series of articles in Eastern Horizon*. She was a member of the Friends Service Unit (the successor organization in China to the Friends Ambulance Unit) Medical Team 19 which went to work in the area in 1947. She revisited Yenan in 1972 and writes not only of her memories of the medical work but also the contrast between then and now.
* Vol. XVI No. 3, March 1977 & No. 4 April 1977 onwards. There is also a good picture of what life in the Shensi countryside was like to be gained from the accounts given in Gunnar Myrdal's book Report from a Chinese Village. Penguin.