Word: hunan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hard truth was that his agency lacked not only food but talent. UNRRA's Shanghai office (responsible for relief in the mortally stricken Hunan province) had long been under fire for rank inefficiency. Irate businessmen reported that relief supplies were sold in coastal markets instead of being shipped to the interior. While transport difficulties were admittedly enormous, an able administrator could have shipped much of the stores to starving regions accessible by river...
...young Dr. Edward Hume, of Yale and Johns Hopkins, had been sent to Hunan Province to do just that. He opened his dispensary on one of Chang-sha's main streets in November 1906. It was not much of a place to look at-four whitewashed rooms in what had been an old inn. The original staff consisted merely of a gatekeeper, a janitor and the doctor. They hung out a black-and-gold lacquered sign reading Yali I Yuan (Yale Court of Medicine), and patients began to drift in. Yali I Yuan was the first Yale-in-China...
...Hume's account of his years in China, which won the $3,500 Norton Medical Award for 1946, is sketchy and unpretentious, but full of anecdote and East-West contrasts. Hunan 40 years ago had only recently admitted foreigners, and even substantial citizens still clung to their old ways. According to Chinese medical lore, the pulses were of prime importance in diagnosis-both the right and the left pulse, tested at three points on each wrist, each point revealing the condition of a particular organ. A freshly killed rooster helped to drive away fever. At time of childbirth, opened...
...ironic inhumanity of all this is that there is still food in Hunan. Scores of beggar children wander with chopsticks and empty rice bowls through Hengyang or lie exhausted in the gutters, but the city's restaurants still serve ten-course feasts for those who can pay. We ate such a meal one night as guests of the local newspapermen, whose slightly fantastic prelude to the banquet was the presentation of carefully wrapped samples of the clay, weeds, rice husks and grass on which people were starving not far from our table...
Time for Squeeze. UNRRA men in Hunan find it practically impossible to determine how much rice is actually on hand. Chinese officialdom, far more conditioned to famine than to organized relief, or more concerned with "squeeze" (timehonored graft) than with efficiency, often seems utterly callous or thoroughly inept. There is no effort to control private rice supplies. Minor officials of CNRRA-UNRRA's Chinese extension-are afraid to make decisions. They will watch a village starve and report it back to UNRRA as dramatic evidence of famine and the need for more help, instead of sending the villagers...