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Ho Faith C. S., Western Medicine for Chinese: How the Hong Kong College of Medicine Achieved a Breakthrough (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), pp. xiii + 230, $50, hardback, ISBN: 9789888390946.
The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese was founded in 1887 with expansive ambitions: the adoption of western medicine and science by the Chinese population of colonial Hong Kong and China more broadly. By such means, the College’s founders aimed at the ‘modernisation’ of the country and the substitution of science for what was believed to be China’s superstition and backwardness, medical and otherwise. Training overwhelmingly – but not exclusively – Chinese students between 1887 and 1915, the College would have an influence greater than its small size of 128 students would suggest. Among its alumni – as respectively staff and student – would be Patrick Manson, sometimes known as the ‘Father of Tropical Medicine’, and Sun Yat-sen, similarly referred to as ‘the Father of Modern China’.
Faith C. S. Ho, formerly head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Hong Kong, has written a thorough and loving account of the College, which, in 1912, was amalgamated into her own university. Her key purposes in this work are twofold: to provide a prosopographical account of those involved in the College and to assess its achievements against its founding intentions. Working from archival sources in Hong Kong, London, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and from interviews conducted with relatives of alumni, Ho has recreated the lives and careers of...