Presentation by David N. Freeman (Yale 1955) at the Centennial Celebration of the XiangYa Hospital.
I bring greetings and congratulations from the family of Dr. Edward H. Hume, founder of the hospital and medical school. I am David Freeman, Dr. Hume’s oldest grandson. My home is near Philadelphia, and I have come to Changsha specifically to participate in this centennial celebration.
I knew Ed and his wife Lotta C my mother’s parents quite well, since they lived in New York City most of my childhood, only 100 miles from Philadelphia. I would like to say a few words about them, as I knew them late in their lives. (Actually, Lotta lived to age 100.)
Grandfather was a joyful, optimistic man, full of affection for his family and friends. He told wonderful stories about his boyhood in Bombay and his adult years in Changsha. He wrote a halfdozen books, including a lively autobiographical memoir ADoctors East, Doctors West, published by Norton in 1946 when Ed Hume was 70 years old. Another book was a biography of Dr. Winston Pettus, a hero of XiangYa during the Second World War, who was killed in a plane crash shortly after the war. Win’s widow Maude is here with us today.
Ed Hume wrote small volumes of sonnets; he loved poetry, other good writing, and music. During his college years at Yale (1893-97), he seriously considered becoming a college teacher of Latin and Greek. Ed Hume had profound affection for his Chinese colleagues, also his patients, Hunanese officials, and the Aman in the street. As soon as he arrived in 1905, he and his family went directly to Kuling for a year of immersion in the Chinese language C with which he had no prior experience. When the family moved toChangsha in the summer of 1906, shortly after my mother Charlotte was born, he already had gained a decent command of the spoken and written language. This was essential to his medical role C diagnosing and treating patients C and his political role, dealing with builders, merchants, and officials at all governmental levels.
I commend to you not only Ed Hume’s books but also those of his wife Lotta, especially ADrama at the Doctors Gate, published in 1961 by the Yale-China Association, when Lotta was 85 years old and four years after Ed Hume died. It too is remarkably readable, full of anecdotes about life in Changsha from 1906 to 1927, the year when Ed’s primary leadership role ended at Changsha.
One of the happiest days for Ed Hume was when Dr. Fu-Shun Yen arrived from New Haven: the second Western-trained doctor at XiangYa. Immediately the clinical burden was halved for Dr. Ed. This began the deliberate and rapid turnover of control to Chinese medical staff. Throughout his career, Ed Hume insisted that this policy was desirable as well as inevitable. Other missions, including several in China, planned to rely on Western doctors indefinitely. Not XiangYa C the faster they could train Chinese men and women to be physicians and nurses, the better. Even in New Haven and other centers of Yale benefaction to XiangYa, there were discontented rumbles. Was this turnover too fast? But Ed and his colleagues ultimately prevailed.
Let me add a couple of China anecdotes about my parents. During the Second World War, my father, a pioneer vascular surgeon, was sent with his American hospital unit to Assam Province in northeastern India. For 22 years, Dad repaired major blood vessels for wounded Chinese and Indian soldiers, also several Japanese POWs. But his major patient load was Chinese working on the Ledo Road, the spur built hastily to bypass sections of the Burma Road captured by the Japanese. Dad came to admire the courage and good cheer of his Chinese patients, of whom he had more than any other doctor in the CBI theater. He taught himself enough Mandarin to take histories and physicals without an interpreter.
After the war, my parents discovered that their shared conversational ability in Mandarin gave them a secret channel for remarks in front of us children, and at boring dinner parties (“Why don’t we give an excuse for leaving now?” in Mandarin). When enrolling in a California public school, I was asked what languages – besides English – were spoken at home; I replied “Chinese” of course, to the interviewer’s amazement.
I close by quoting from one of Grandfather Hume’s anecdotes, at the end of Chapter 10 of ADoctors East, Doctors West. The scene is nervous: after two years of operation, the Yali hospital has its first patient death, a young farm boy with a terminal infection. Alone, Ed Hume is confronting the bereaved father:
Seeing me enter, he knelt down respectfully and kowtowed three times. I begged him to rise and sit with me on the ceremonial settee at the top of the room. While still standing, he said, very quietly, AI have come to thank you, sir!
I had expected an angry outburst
You have provided for my dead boy a coffin far more costly than we poor people in the country could ever have afforded. For the boy to die was the will of Heaven; but you, sir, have been a friend. I have discovered today how truly our great sage Confucius spoke when he said:
Within the four seas
All men are brothers.
I shall return to the village and tell all the people there that you are truly our friend and that we can trust you and your hospital fully.
From that day on, we had no fear of death.
Thank you.
