On May 8, 1910, Wu Yingkai was born in Xinmin County, Liaoning Province, into a Manchu intellectual family. His father was a poor teacher at the county teacher's college, and his family was not well off. Understanding Wu Yingkai from a young age to help the family to do housework, childhood life has created a life of hard work, diligence and simplicity of his character. Due to his grandmother's frail health, several famous old Chinese doctors in the county and the director of the church hospital were invited to the house to treat her, these doctors who came to the door left a deep impression on the childhood Wu Yingkai, who felt that the doctor was a respected profession. So, as a doctor became Wu Yingkai very early dream. 1926, Wu Yingkai entered Shenyang Beiling provincial high school No. 3, due to the lack of interest in science and technology, the following year he did not wait for the graduation of the Shenyang Xiaohuayian Medical University, the dream of childhood began to gradually become clear. This medical school was created by the Scots, in full compliance with the specifications of the British-style medical education, medical style, learning style is very strict. Here, Wu Yingkai developed the good habit of studying step by step and working conscientiously and responsibly. At the same time, his vision continued to broaden and his mindset changed, and he began to be determined to do something for the country, to learn good skills and serve the patients and the public. He not only completed his studies well, but also secretly added anti-Japanese work. 1933, due to the betrayal of traitors, he had to leave Shenyang to work in Peking Union Medical College Hospital. In Wu Yingkai's autobiography, he mentioned that the years of study and life in Peking Union Medical College were extremely important years in his life.
He came to Peking Union Medical College Hospital in 1933. He started there as an intern and was soon selected as a postgraduate surgical student because of his excellent ratings. between '36 and '38, he served as an assistant resident, rotating between general surgery, urology, and surgical oncology, and at the end of June '38, he became chief resident. During this period, Wu was able to draw on the strengths of many different surgical specialties and was able to perform many major surgeries when he became an attending surgeon; at the age of 30, he performed the first esophageal cancer resection and intrathoracic esophagogastric anastomosis in China, ending the history of Chinese surgeons who were unable to perform esophageal cancer surgery. At that time, the operation should have been done by the chief of surgery, American expert Loux, because Loux was sick and temporarily
decided to let him on the battlefield. After the successful operation, Mr. Wu laughed and said he was a "newbie with good luck". In fact, this "good luck" was created through his own hard work.
In 1941, Wu Yingkai came to the United States to study at the University of Washington's Barnes Hospital. He was supposed to study plastic surgery, but in less than three months, due to personnel changes at Concordia, he was transferred to the Department of Thoracic Surgery under the leadership of Prof. Graham, a world-renowned surgical authority. This change made Wu Yingkai very happy because thoracic surgery was his interest. During his training at Barnes Hospital, Wu spent most of his time outside of work in the library. At that time, Prof. Graham was also experimenting with esophageal cancer resections, but there had been no survivors, whereas Wu Yingkai had performed 11 such surgeries and six of the patients' lives had been prolonged, which Prof. Graham appreciated very much. During this time, he applied the surgical techniques he learned from Concordia and the plastic surgery bandaging methods he learned from Barnes Hospital to thoracoplasty, improved the aseptic operation, and achieved 120 cases without septic infection, which was a very remarkable achievement in the 1940s, and his American counterparts were all impressed by him.
In 1943, the domestic anti-Japanese upsurge, living abroad for a long time, Wu Yingkai felt y uneasy, he eagerly looked forward to returning to China to participate in the anti-Japanese cause, he said to his mentor, Prof. Graham, who warmly retained him, "I am grateful for your goodwill, but when their own country suffered from the invasion of other countries at the moment, the domestic urgent need for people like me; and how can I live abroad for a long time? abroad?" In August of that year, Wu Yingkai departed for China, bringing with him a number of single-volume dissertations given to him by renowned experts, as well as medical equipment and surgical instruments purchased with a $1,500 grant from the U.S. Pharmaceutical Aid Society for China (PASC).
On the voyage there was such a small episode: there was a ship of Americans pointed at them and said: "without our American support, China will soon be destroyed by Japan", Wu Yingkai was very angry on the spot to refute: "thank you, Americans, you are still Pearl Harbor protection! Well, the Chinese themselves will save China, do not want the gifts of others." Many years later this scene is still fresh in his memory.
After the end of the war, Wu Yingkai returned to the north, and in 1946 he set up the Department of Thoracic Surgery at the Central Hospital in Tianjin, where he performed China's first pericardiectomy for chronic pericarditis.
Wu Yingkai returned to Union Medical College (UMCC), which was taken over by the Chinese government in 1948, and he was the first and youngest Chinese chief of surgery at UMCC. During his lifetime, Wu founded three hospitals: the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Chest Hospital, Fu Wai Hospital and Anzhen Hospital.
In 1956, Wu Yingkai founded the military's first chest hospital, and half a year later, the hospital's reorganization and construction took shape, and in August 1958, the chest hospital was transferred to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, which had been reorganized from the Union Medical College, and was merged with a hospital in preparation to form the Fuwai Hospital, of which Wu was the president. During his work in Fu Wai Hospital, Wu Yingkai organized a scientific research collaboration on esophageal cancer in Beijing, Hebei, Henan, Shandong and Shanxi. Wu Ya, a researcher of the Department of Pathology of Fu Wai Hospital, who went with him to various places for census and treatment at that time, talked about the situation at that time.
Wu went to the high incidence area of esophageal cancer in Linxian County, Henan Province three times in 59, 64 and 79 to investigate the disease situation, and found that the local residents preferred hot food, and the food was coarse and hard, and lacked vitamins. On the basis of these investigations, Wu Yingkai proposed a program to prevent esophageal cancer. At the grassroots level, he also led the medical staff to actively carry out screening and surgery, which enabled many early-stage patients to get a chance to live on. The local people often talk about, "If it weren't for that President Wu in the Zhongshan suit, we don't know how much more we would have to suffer."
Through long-term and continuous practice and organizing a large collaboration among four provinces and one city, he initially elucidated the natural history, epidemiological characteristics and pathogenesis of esophageal cancer. On this basis, he put forward the concept of pathological staging of esophageal cancer by combining the clinical manifestations and X-ray diagnostic characteristics, and thereafter proposed the four-stage classification and the pathology theory of multiple points of origin, which are also innovative in the international arena, and greatly pushed forward the scientific research on the prevention and treatment of esophageal cancer and made our country's prevention and treatment of esophageal cancer reach the leading level in the international arena. The Four Provinces and One City Prevention and Control Scientific Research Collaboration Group not only drives and promotes the treatment research of esophageal cancer across the country, but also accumulates experience for the multi-unit scientific research collaboration in multiple provinces and cities.
Anzhen Hospital is the last hospital founded by Wu Yingkai in his life, and he has devoted the most efforts to it. The current Anzhen has an excellent track record in cardiothoracic surgery, cardiovascular epidemiology and population control research. Wu Yingkai commented on Anzhen Hospital, which he founded with his own hands: "advanced system, beautiful environment, excellent equipment, strong people and horses, results are beginning to appear, and there is still a lot of development to be done". However, at the beginning of the construction of the hospital, Wu Yingkai was only given a "1200 square meters of building area approval". An old man, to build a hospital on such a penniless basis, the degree of hardship can be imagined.
Late in the Cultural Revolution, Wu Yingkai was already too old to go back to the operating table, but his strong sense of enterprise and sensitivity to the development of medical science prompted him to start a career in China's cardiovascular epidemiology and population control, and called it his "second specialty".
In 1982, Wu Yingkai led a group of experts, in accordance with the World Health Organization's MONICA program, organized and led a professional team of 730,000 people in six districts of Beijing, as well as 5.5 million people in 16 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, to carry out the world's largest population monitoring of cardiovascular disease, and obtained a large number of first-hand data on cardiovascular morbidity, mortality, risk factors and other factors in China. It has obtained a large amount of first-hand information on cardiovascular morbidity, mortality, risk factors, etc., which has provided valuable materials for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases in China and internationally. Zhou Beifan, a researcher at the Epidemiology Research Office of Fu Wai Hospital, assisted Wu Yingkai in conducting a hypertension census. Wu Zhaosu also accompanied Wu Yingkai in carrying out population-based prevention and treatment of cardiovascular patients in Beijing's Shijingshan District.
Wu had been engaged in surgical work and was a layman in epidemiology, but he felt that he was duty-bound to do so, so he started from scratch, humbly seeking advice from Professor He Guanqing, an epidemiologist, and Professor Gao Runquan, a statistician, and soon his work took off. 1979, he organized a hypertension census of 90 cities in 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, as well as of 208 rural areas, with extraordinary courage. Hypertension census, totaling more than 4 million people over 15 years of age **** census. This was the first large-scale, planned and international standardized cardiovascular epidemiological study in China, a landmark work, the results of which are still widely cited by scholars at home and abroad. Wu also set up China's first Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Population Prevention and Control Research Laboratory, based in Beijing's Shijingshan District, and carried out a lot of pioneering work. He personally went down to the field to organize investigations, train cadres, summarize experiences, and guide the national epidemiology and population control work.
On one occasion, Wu went to Shijingshan District to visit patients in the village of Shichou, and suddenly a torrential downpour came, and in an instant the water on the ground was no longer over his legs, and he was shaking in the water. Old Wu leaned on a stick and continued to walk forward. We followed him, braving the wind and rain, measuring blood pressure from door to door, delivering antihypertensive medication, asking about his medical history, and registering his condition. From the bottom of my heart, I was impressed by his strength of not dying until the Yellow River was gone. On the basis of more than a year of painstaking research, after several years of hard work, Wu created the city and even the country's first cardiovascular disease population prevention and control points, using the village health center, district health centers and municipal hospitals three-level interactive prevention and treatment model. Practice has proved that this is suitable for our national conditions of cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment model. Since then, the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease has achieved more and more obvious results. Five years later the mortality rate of cardiovascular diseases in the population of the control points had dropped by 13%, of which the mortality rate of stroke (stroke) had dropped by 23%.
In 1983, the World Health Organization decided to carry out the first large-scale monitoring of trends and determinants of cardiovascular disease in more than 20 million people on four continents. It was referred to as the Monica Program. Upon learning of this international research project, Wu personally went to the World Health Organization to ask for help on behalf of China. Thanks to his efforts, China became the only developing country in the Monica Program. At the beginning of the Monica Program, there were more than 20 countries participating in the program, and only China and Japan in Asia. The World Health Organization was particularly strict in its assessment, and Japan was soon eliminated, but our scores were A and A+ every time. At that time, Mr. Wu was very strict with us, and he was very strict with the translation of the program, word by word. In September 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced to the world at its headquarters in Geneva the full results of the largest global collaborative cardiovascular study to date. A picture of Wu was published in the summary booklet of the study, calling him the oldest qualified researcher and expressing his respect and praise. Wu's highly responsible spirit for his career has not only honored our country, but also set a shining example for every one of our staff members. Wu Yingkai greatly appreciated the philosophical thinking of "the superior doctor treats the unhealthy" in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. For this noble goal, he devoted his whole heart and soul. Until the last moment of his life, he never forgot the health education of the people, and on May 2, 1995, the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau of the Beijing Evening News launched the Health Express activity, and Wu Yingkai became the conductor of the "Health Express". Guan Chunfang, a reporter for the Beijing Evening News, became friends with Wu Yingkai and shed tears of excitement at the memory of what Wu had done for the health of the people.
The "Health Express" was born out of the results of a survey on high blood pressure that Wu led doctors from Beijing's cardiopulmonary prevention office to conduct over the course of eight years. In less than 100 words, it was written that there were "2 million hypertensive patients" in Beijing, in other words, one out of every five Beijingers had high blood pressure, and the number of patients was the highest in the country. The city leaders were shocked, and Wu was so anxious that he took a copy of "New Strategies for the Prevention and Treatment of Hypertension in Beijing" that he had written himself, and approached the head of the Health Bureau, saying, "It's really too late for health education in Beijing." His tone was nonchalant. "There is no other trick, the only way is mass population education", so we set up the Health Express and Wu became our first conductor. He was already nearly 90 years old at that time and participated in many science popularization activities. I always felt that a big expert like him was actually engaged in health popularization, something that even many small doctors were reluctant to do. He once said: "The first thing a smart doctor does is to prevent diseases, and then to cure them", and at the age of 85, he went to Miyun and climbed up to the fifth floor to give a talk on "health popularization" for the farmers, and once, when he saw a fat man on the road, he stopped the car to persuade the man to lose weight. He was so disgusted with smoking and drinking that he had to persuade a smoker he didn't even know to quit while he was undergoing treatment for a serious illness.
I still remember the day the health class opened, it was a great success. People from the Working People's Palace of Culture in front of groups of people flocked to the park in the Museum of Science and Technology. 300 people crowded the venue, even outside the door of the East Square are full of people, in the face of a tidal wave of people, the experts had to exceptionally change to the radio room to lecture. Many people simply sit on the ground, put this pad on their knees to record. This is more than 10,000 people came to listen to the spectacular scene, was the Xinhua News Agency reporter photographed with a camera, a "big classroom under the acacia cypress tree" photo by the United Kingdom and the United States and other countries more than a dozen newspapers competing for publication. The foreign media praised in amazement: "This is Chinese health education". A month before Wu's death, I visited him in the hospital. He shook my hand and said that a book called "Boarding the Health Express", which was published by our Health Express, had a particularly large circulation of more than one million copies, and he said that this was a particularly good job, and that medical popularization should combine medicine and popularization of science, experts and the public, and the government and the people. This is the direction of health science popularization in the 21st century in China. His mind was particularly clear and he thought about this issue until the end of his life.
I will always remember the last words he said to me, he said the Health Express will continue, this is a cause that I want to do in my life, I can't do it you have to do it.
Wu Yingkai is a deservedly great doctor, medical achievements, the concept of practicing medicine, the great personality.
In 1995, Wu Yingkai wrote a song as a will: "Eighty-five years of age, a will in advance, do an autopsy after death, cremation does not leave a bone, do not open a memorial service, do not engage in the valedictory ceremony, such as getting no treatment, I would rather die in peace. I die of peace of mind, friends and relatives do not grieve, there is always death in life, live when self-improvement."
September 30, 2001, Wu Yingkai "after the first to do", made a will: "I am 91 years old, life is coming to an end, the aftermath must be simple. If incurable diseases are found, there is no need for active treatment, so as to minimize the pain and let me die naturally. After my death, I will have a pathological autopsy, which will be compared with my medical records, and any specimens that are useful for teaching will be preserved by the Department of Pathology. Please contact Anzhen Hospital for cremation, no ashes, no makeup, no farewell ceremony, no obituary, no memorial service. ......"
On the sixth day after Wu Yingkai's death, in accordance with his wishes, Anzhen Hospital did not hold a memorial service for their veteran president, but only intended to say goodbye to him in a small area. However, thousands of people showed up unannounced that day to say goodbye to Wu, and eight young cardiac surgeons carried the old dean's casket and put him on a hearse from the front of the cardiac surgery building, which was his favorite place to see him before he died.
People stood in the rain, with reverence, seeing off the century-old doctor who devoted his life to the development of medicine in the motherland and the health of the people.