Richard Frey

Richard Frey (1920 to 2004), known in China as Fu Lai, was an Austrian-born military physician who spent his adult life in China. Born Richard Stein in a Jewish family in Vienna, he learned radiography while still at school and wished to become a doctor, but he was expelled after the Anschluss and left medical studies in late 1938 under threat of arrest. He reached Shanghai in January 1939, worked at the Tianjin People's Hospital and in 1941 joined the Eighth Route Army, where he taught doctors and paramedics at the Bethune Health School. In 1943, short of quinine, he fought a malaria epidemic among the troops with acupuncture, and in 1945 he is credited with first producing penicillin in China, at Yan'an. He later worked in disease control in remote areas of southwest China, took Chinese nationality in 1952 and is regarded as a pioneer of integrative Chinese and Western medicine there.