Liz PY Chee vividly remembers the first time she visited a bear farm. It was 2009, and Chee, who was working for a Singapore-based animal welfare group, flew to Laos to tour a Chinese-owned facility. The animals Chee saw “were hardly recognizable as bears,” she later wrote, “because they had rubbed most of their fur off against the bars of the cages and had grown very long toenails through disuse of their feet.”
Medicine
Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease.
130 Years of Medicine in Hong Kong places particular focus on medical and financial factors. Each chapter begins with an abstract in the style of an academic paper and frequent subtitles help with the location of specific information. As Hong Kong has been heavily involved in a number of pandemic scares in the 21st century, a look at the history of the Hong Kong University Faculty of Medicine that has tackled SARS and various Avian influenzas reveals how historical factors can shape an institution.