Coming to China

In the spring of 1907, in the turbulent Three Gorges Yangtze River, an old wooden boat was pulled upstream by trackers at a very slow speed. In this ordinary wooden boat, sat the young Dr. A. W. Lindsay and his newlywed wife, Ms. Lin Tiexin. They are all Canadians and were sent to work in Chengdu by the Canadian Anglo-American Society. Facing the steep rock walls of the Three Gorges, the rapid river water, and the strange people, they were surprised and happy, feeling both heroic and sorrowful that the heroes would never return. After a month's journey by wooden boat and half a month's journey by land in a "sliding pole" (a simple bamboo sedan), we finally completed the "difficult to reach the sky" Shu Road and arrived in Chengdu. This day happened to be May 10, 1907.

The beginning of his career

After arriving in Chengdu, the young dentist thought he could start his career. According to the church's regulations, Lin Ze must first learn the local language. You must master Chinese to treat Chinese people, and such language training usually takes two years. As the first dental missionary to China, he found that his colleagues were skeptical and even opposed to his arrival. Also, will the Chinese reject dentists? It's even more unknown.

Career Difficulties

Even in the United States, the most popular doctors are not specialized doctors like Lin Ze, but ordinary doctors, also known as general practitioners. The popular name is what the Chinese later jokingly called the "Taiwan Balm Doctor". In fact, Westerners in Chengdu thought so too at that time. They said that China, especially Sichuan, only needed ordinary doctors and not dentists, so they forced Lin Ze to return home quickly. This was the first blow Lin Ze suffered in China. Fortunately, many of the missionaries' dentures were damaged and in urgent need of repair, so the dentist, who was almost "expelled", was allowed to stay. It was this young dentist who was almost deported by the church, who opened a new page in the history of Chinese dentistry with his amazing courage and perseverance. As early as 1892, Dr. Kai De established Renji Hospital in Chengdu Sisheng Temple. With the help of Dr. Kai De, a room was set aside as Lin Ze's dental clinic. It was the late Qing Dynasty, and according to Chinese tradition, men and women were not allowed to be intimate, so the clinic must have two treatment rooms, one for men and one for women. The hospital believed that Chinese women would not seek treatment from a dentist, so it gave him the fourth floor, which was inconvenient to go up and downstairs. Surprisingly, the first patient on the day Mr. Lin Ze opened his clinic was a woman: During the examination, Lin Ze found that she had suffered from an alveolar abscess for more than ten years. The alveolar bone was destroyed and filled with pus. It was said that she had taken A large amount of traditional Chinese medicine did not bring any improvement, and the patient was in pain and despair. Fortunately, her condition improved quickly and she recovered soon after being treated with tooth extraction and thorough curettage. Lin Ze's neat and elegant personality and his exquisite skills in curing diseases quickly made him famous, and the number of people seeking medical treatment increased day by day.

Lin Ze did not visit the doctor, which made the official wives and rich ladies in Chengdu very dissatisfied. According to etiquette, the female family members are not allowed to leave the high-walled courtyard house, and doctors are always invited to visit the house. The Governor took the lead in sending his niece who suffered from lower jaw necrosis for medical treatment, breaking this tradition. Every time this distinguished lady came to the dental clinic, she was always accompanied by a large number of servants and guards. Such a swaggering move caused a storm in the city. But from then on, it is not surprising that female patients visited dental clinics, and the number of female patients was as much as that of male patients.

Initial results

Only three years after Lin Ze arrived in Sichuan, his dental work was recognized by the church. He admired Lin Ze's hard work and enthusiasm very much, so he agreed to Lin Ze's request to build an independent dental hospital for him on the left side of the Si Sheng Temple chapel. When the dental hospital was about to be completed, there was a wave of road protection in Sichuan, and Lin Ze and his wife went to Shanghai to seek refuge. Fortunately, social order was restored soon after the storm, and Lin Ze and his wife returned to Chengdu to preside over the opening ceremony of the dental hospital, which became the first official specialized dental hospital in Southwest China. Later, a new dental hospital was built, divided into five departments, known as "No. 1 in the Far East".

Be a medical scientist, not a craftsman

There was once a hilarious "tooth care advertisement" on the wall of a dental hospital: a Sichuan old man with a sallow face and thin muscles, holding a job in his hand, He smiled, revealing the only decayed tooth in his mouth. This "toothless picture" makes onlookers feel the fear of loose teeth. At that time, China lacked "Taiwan Balm Doctors" and even less specialized dentists. If compared with the city of Chicago in the United States at the same time, where there was one dentist for every thousand people, China needed several million dentists. There are also hundreds of thousands of patients in hospitals. In Chengdu, which has a population of 100,000, Lin Ze is the only dentist. He works hard in a small dental hospital, serving as a doctor, teacher, assistant, nurse, and technician.

Cultivating dental talents

Since the Chinese dentists trained in the past were similar to old-style apprentices and it was not easy to acquire a wealth of knowledge, Lin Ze discussed with BGI to launch dental training at the university. Education and training of dental talents. In 1921, China had its first dentist, Huang Tianqi, who was also the first dental graduate in Asia. The dental discipline also attracts many female students. These female dentists are gentler and more popular with patients than male doctors. Before dentistry was offered in a department or school of any other university in China, modern scientific dental education had firmly laid its foundation at West China Union University.

Lin Ze has five expectations for dentists: 1. Promote modern dental treatment and restoration in China; 2. Provide higher dental education; 3. Carry out preventive dentistry; 4. Carry out dental scientific research; 5. Do Medical scientists, don’t be craftsmen. Because of Lin Ze's way of running the school, many of China's dental medicine talents today are students who graduated from West China. As early as the late 1920s, the West China Dental College recruited foreign students from the Soviet Union, Hungary, North Korea, Indonesia and other countries. It was one of the earliest places in China to accept foreign students to learn modern science and technology.