Qiu Fazu

Qiu Fazu was a Chinese surgeon and politician, born in Hangzhou in 1914 and dead in Wuhan in 2008, who is regarded in the People's Republic of China as the father of modern Chinese surgery. His mother died young of appendicitis for lack of adequate medical help, which led him to study medicine, first at the German School of Medicine in Shanghai and then, on a Humboldt scholarship, at the University of Munich, where he took his doctorate and medical licence in 1939. In 1945, while heading a makeshift hospital at Bad Tolz, he hid about forty concentration camp prisoners from the SS by calling them typhoid patients, an act later honoured by the German Society for Visceral Surgery. He returned to China in 1946, led surgery at the Sino-US Hospital in Shanghai, and from 1978 held senior posts at Tongji Medical University in Wuhan, where he headed the organ transplant research institute and wrote a standard surgery textbook still in use.