Wald Lectures on Chinese Medicine

"This kind of hassle would never happen in China," George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, said Wednesday night as Lowell Lecture Hall's microphone went back into operation. "In the Chinese's great new experiment, everything that's undertaken is going to be well done."

About 200 people heard Wald, who recently returned from a five-week visit to the People's Republic of China, speak on "Chinese Medicine and Science."

Chinese hospitals and universities involve "a bit of a culture shock, something you have to get used to if you can--I could-because the physicians and professors take a back seat," Wald said. "The administrative Revolutionary Committees are chaired not by a professor--not even by a dean. In fact, they don't have deans: they have responsible persons."

Wald described the use of acupuncture in treatment and as anesthesia and the reattachment of severed limbs as the two greatest advances of Chinese medicine.

He showed slides of one operation he anesthetized subject, at the completion waved at us, so that you felt like yelling for an encore, and she said she hoped the operation would increase friendship with the American people."

At this point, a woman in the audience fainted and was carried out.

Wald surmised that the reattachment of limbs developed when a machinist whose hand had been cut off asked a surgeon to sew it back on and, told it was impossible, said, "Hey, you read your Little Red Book lately?"

Wald said that reattachments are rarely performed in America partly because "if you did sew on such a hand, you couldn't write a paper on it."

"The Chinese are steering a middle course between oppression by colonialism, capitalism and imperialism on he right and oppression by an elite of bureaucrats on the left," Wald said. "That's what the Cultural Revolution was all about--giving a literal meaning to the dictatorship of the proletarian."

"Dictatorship of the proletariat means a surgeon does his level best to sew a working man's hand back on." he concluded.