First director of Macau's Kiang Wu Hospital. Arriving in 1935, he served Kiang Wu as a volunteer Western-medicine doctor and from 1946 as its first director, modernising a traditional charitable hospital. Across seventeen years of practice in Macau he became one of the most consequential physicians — and patriotic community figures — of the modern era.
A doctor who spent seventeen years in Macau, treated countless patients, and lifted a charity hospital sustained by donations across the threshold of modern medicine — his name was Ke Lin.
Ke Lin was the first director of Macau's Kiang Wu Hospital. Arriving in 1935, he volunteered for years at Kiang Wu before becoming its first director in 1946, modernising the charitable hospital and becoming one of the most consequential physicians of modern Macau.
Profile
- Chinese Name: 柯麟 (originally 柯輝萼)
- English Name: Ke Lin
- Born: 1900
- Region: Macao (native of Haifeng, Guangdong)
- Domains: Medicine · Charity · Civic life
- Industry: Western medicine · Medical education
- Subject type: Doctor · First director of Kiang Wu Hospital
Background
Ke Lin was born in 1900 in Haicheng, Haifeng, Guangdong, to a small merchant family. In 1921 he entered the Guangdong Public Medical School — the predecessor of the Sun Yat-sen School of Medicine — for a systematic modern medical training, and in 1926 he joined the Chinese Communist Party. This dual identity, medicine and politics, would run through the rest of his life.
Career
I. Arriving in Macau (1935)
In 1935 Ke Lin was sent to Macau, where he rented a house near Rua das Estalagens and opened a clinic as his public face. He volunteered at Kiang Wu Hospital as a Western-medicine doctor and taught at its nursing school, bringing modern Western medicine into a charitable hospital that had centred on free Chinese-medicine consultations.
II. First director (1946)
In 1946 Ke Lin became Kiang Wu's first director. He institutionalised and modernised the hospital, introducing Western-medicine departments and nursing training and growing Kiang Wu from a benevolent-hall hospital into one of Macau's principal medical institutions. In all he practised in Macau for seventeen years (1935–1951).
III. North to the Sun Yat-sen School of Medicine (1951)
In September 1951 Ke Lin left Macau for Guangzhou to serve as dean and Party secretary of the Sun Yat-sen School of Medicine, leading medical education for years and hailed as a master educator. He was elected to the First National People's Congress in 1954. In old age he was reassigned as an adviser to the State Council Ministry of Health and settled in Beijing, where he died in 1991.