The story of the Wuhan Union Hospital is a remarkable story. It began in 1866 founded by a non-medical Christian preacher as a small 50 bedded unit which expanded to a fully functioning 240 bedded contemporary hospital by 1928. It withstood massive flooding by the bursting of the Yangtse River defences in 1931, the incessant Japanese bombing in 1937-8 and the Japanese occupation and eviction of staff and patients from the premises from 1942 until Japan's surrender. Added to all that the Hospital had to cope with Allied bombing in 1944 but it survived until the War's end. The change from multiple private donations to State control was far from smooth. In 1950 the fundamental ideology of Marxist Communism was very different from the Christian philosophy that had started the institution. However alongside the research, teaching and specialisation; the high standard of care and concern for the individual patient has remained the same.
About the Author: Walford Gillison was born in the Union Hospital in 1935 because his parents were London Missionary Society missionaries. Apart from a year in the U.K. in 1938 he lived in Wuhan during the Japanese occupation from 1939 until 1942. He was then interned in the occupied east part of China with all foreigners belonging to those countries at war with Japan since Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Hong Kong after December 1941. He was a prisoner of war with his parents and 636 other internees in a camp in the city of Yangzhou on the banks of the Grand Canal about 200 miles north of Shanghai, from March 1943 until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. His grandfather Tom Gillison started work at the Union Hospital in 1883, retired in 1928 and spent the eight remaining years of his retirement partly as a Christian pastor but also translating medical books from English into Chinese with the skilled help of a Mandarin scholar. The author's father Keith Gillison started work at the Union Hospital as a surgeon in 1928 until 1950, so it was no surprise that the author followed his family tradition of becoming a surgeon in the U.K. While he was trained as an old-fashioned general surgeon in his youth, his interests focussed towards Surgical Gastroenterology on heading his own department in 1973. Apart from publishing various articles in surgical journals he was the chief editor of a multi-authored textbook by tfm publishing entitled "Pioneers in Surgical Gastroenterology". He has only recently studied the history of the Wuhan Union Hospital since he discovered that many members of the current staff have shown in interest on what happened since the foundation of the hospital in 1866 until the time the State of the new era of government of China took over in 1949 - 1950. In his research he was delighted to discover the first publication by the Union Hospital in any western medical journal was from work by the Hospital's Institute of Technology. This article in the 1940 British Medical Journal is referred to on page 46 in the text. The author admits that there are several gaps in the history which he had hoped to fill, but was unable to fill, because of the loss of records in both Wuhan and in London. Nevertheless he believes that the stories provided will give an idea of the heroic struggles during those historically tough years before the State of China took over the institution.