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It's a slice of history that almost got lost in time. A pioneering Ontario doctor travels to China years before Canada's best-known medical emissary - Norman Bethune - is born. He starts a hospital, introduces Western medicine, free health care for the poor and remarkable agricultural reform, but is chased from the country at gunpoint during revolutionary turmoil in 1927. Back in North America, his family relishes its history but takes the tale no further. The name William Macklin remains known to few Westerners, and China is subsumed by war and the communist revolution. But the Drum Tower Hospital survives. In the old capital of Nanjing, it grows and thrives, and newer, larger buildings surround the original hospital. Now, the Toronto university Dr. Macklin attended as a teen and the Chinese hospital he founded as an adult hope to turn the legacy of one remarkable man into a rich collaboration for the future. "Dr. Macklin's spirit of benevolence for the people and for the patient is always the most important part of the hospital," Drum Tower Hospital president Yitao Ding said in his first interview ever with international press. "Dr. Macklin lived in Nanjing for 40 years [and]he left a lot of his footprints there." The tale starts in Biddulph Township, north of London, where William Edward Macklin was born in 1860. By the age of 20, he had a medical degree from the University of Toronto and a practice in Poplar Hill, not far from his birthplace. But adventure called: A U.S.-based church called the Disciples of Christ was recruiting missionaries to Asia and Dr. Macklin signed on. He went to the Japanese city of Akita, but German doctors were already there. So Dr. Macklin continued searching for a place of need, making his way to the bustling walled city of Nanjing, China, on April 16, 1886. Few locals had seen a foreigner when Dr. Macklin stepped off the flat-bottomed boat. Over the next 41 years, he went from distrusted "foreign devil" to lionized city leader. Known by the Chinese as "Ma Lin," he opened the Drum Tower Hospital in 1892. Beloved by the poor he helped, he also counted Sun Yat-sen, the doctor and revolutionary considered the father of modern China, among his friends. "We can call him both a medical and social reformer," said Carl Penton, a U.S. researcher with the Drum Tower Hospital. "He [introduced]major indigent care. That had never been done. The things we think of with Mother Teresa in India, Dr. Macklin had done that from the 1890s. When he saw those on the streets dying, he brought them into the hospital. For those who could not pay, there was an entire ward." Recovering patients could instead work in the gardens that in turn fed patients in the hospital. Dr. Macklin also introduced an opium-addiction treatment centre. Outside the hospital, he instigated agricultural change and acted as a peacemaker during periods of local upheaval, while raising eight children with U.S.-born wife Dorothy DeLany. "He was trying to address the root cause of social ills. It was innovative. It was ingenious. It was totally new," Mr. Penton said. And then the nationalist soldiers came in 1927. Sensing trouble, Dr. Macklin had already sent his family, including heavily pregnant daughter Dorothy, to the British ships waiting in the harbour. He stayed at the hospital with Dorothy's husband, Leslie Hancock. Soldiers dragged the two men into the street. Dr. Macklin knew his only saving grace would be the Chinese respect for elders. The 67-year-old got down on his knees, threw open his coat and challenged the soldiers to shoot. They didn't, and Dr. Macklin's students paid for the men's freedom and helped them escape the next day. Dr. Macklin and his children never returned. Historian Michael Bliss believes that the almost-forgotten doctor ranks alongside, if not above, Dr. Norman Bethune, the communist war surgeon who died while helping Chinese soldiers in 1939, now a Canadian legend. "If [someone]asks who took medicine to China, the answer is always and only Bethune," said Prof. Bliss, who only learned of Dr. Macklin recently. "That is a significant distortion of history. ... I think that Macklin can be seen to be a builder of lasting medical institutions in China. Probably that's a more substantial legacy than anything Bethune did." Scores of young Canadian medical graduates worked in China from 1890 to 1935, including fellow Ontarian James Butchart, who joined Dr. Macklin in 1891, and Dr. Macklin's sister, Daisy, also a doctor. But world events almost erased the missionaries' work from the chronicles of history. When the Japanese invaded Nanjing in 1937, they decimated the city and destroyed many records. After the Communist Party took power in 1949, they worked to erase the memory of missionary work by closing Christian institutions or changing the names, Prof. Bliss said. Missionaries were denounced as invaders. Dr. Bethune was much more suitable to the communist cause, so it was his work that they lauded. "In the new China, the less ideologically blinkered China, it's now possible to recover that [broader]history," Prof. Bliss said. "The revival of interest in Macklin is kind of a remembering of the much longer history of Western medicine in China." Dr. Macklin's granddaughter Marjorie Hancock never fully understood the family legacy until she visited Nanjing in 2002, where the original hospital has been converted into China's only museum dedicated to a foreign physician. Ms. Hancock's childhood home in Mississauga was filled with her mother Dorothy's love of China. Chopsticks were de rigueur at the dinner table, restaurant meals were only eaten in Chinatown, and a family outing was a visit to the Ming tombs at the Royal Ontario Museum. Dr. and Mrs. Macklin joined the Hancock family in 1945 to live out their final years, but Marjorie was too young to sit around listening to old tales. Now living on the same family property, Ms. Hancock, the family historian, wishes she could reclaim those days and talk about the photos, letters, documents and keepsakes stored in a large trunk in her living room. "There's a mystique about him. They just thought he was head and shoulders above all of them," said Ms. Hancock. "When you go to China and see it with your own eyes, you see how other people understand and treasure it." Chinese tradition honours the past and sees history in 60-year cycles. Sixty years lapsed between Dr. Macklin opening his first clinic in Nanjing and his death in Mississauga in 1947. Sixty years later, Dr. Ding sent representatives to pay their respects at Dr. Macklin's grave. Dr. Macklin's great-granddaughter, Carol Hancock, alerted U of T to the pending visit. The medical faculty's newly formed Research and International Relations office welcomed the delegation, and discovered a hidden history of one of its alumni. "This was really out of the blue," said Peter Lewis, the vice-dean of Research and International Relations. He, too, had never heard of Dr. Macklin. "That's a little concerning, although now that we know, we're actually kind of proud of our involvement with this individual." Drum Tower Hospital president Yitao Ding is currently in Toronto on a four-day visit to explore possible research collaborations with the University of Toronto and the University Health Network. The Drum Tower Hospital - which is considering nominating Dr. Macklin to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in a joint submission with U of T - is undergoing expansions that will make it the largest medical facility in China. While its research laboratories are not in the same class as Toronto's, its head scientists hope future collaborations can lead to a combined exploration of Western and traditional Chinese practices. Dr. Ding considers the Toronto visit a homecoming, and he hopes the next 60-year cycle will bring a deepening connection between the medical centres. "We need more modern concepts and thoughts to China. ...," he said. "Western medicine is very open now. Medicine is borderless." Toronto, meanwhile, seems keen to regain a piece of its past that touches closely on its modern self. Unlike Dr. Bethune, the driven, obsessed man whose legacy has been described by some historians as "enormously exaggerated," Prof. Bliss said the work of Dr. Macklin is one almost entirely centred on compassion and devotion. "These were important things to bring to poverty-stricken societies," Prof. Bliss said. "There were a bunch of great medical missionaries. Macklin was one of them." Follow us on Twitter: @globeandmail |
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