In the last year, everyone has worn them like never before in life, excluding doctors and dentists. These are the surgical masks, essential for not getting sick and not letting the virus circulate in times of pandemic. Google today with its doodle tells who invented them. It is the Malaysian doctor Wu Lien-teh.
During the Manchurian plague in China in 1911 he developed a type of cotton wool mask that helped put an end to the epidemic. In short, like today, the ingenuity and the progress it takes place in difficult times.
Wu Lien-teh was born on March 10, 1879 in Penang, in Malaysia, from parents of Chinese origin. He studied medicine at the University of Cambridge, England. In 1908 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Chinese Empire Military School of Medicine and two years later, commissioned by the Beijing Foreign Ministry, was sent to Manchuria to study and identify a mysterious disease.
It was one over lung disease that killed 60,000 people in two years. He didn’t know, but he understood by doing an autopsy on a woman that the disease was spread by air. From here he decided to design masks to cover his nose and mouth. They are the first surgical masks. Even then they became a fundamental weapon to limit the spread of the plague.
Wu Lien-teh, who died in Penang on January 21, 1960, also argued for the need for quarantine and sanitation of buildings. These are the rules that still work today. In 1935 he became the first Malay to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
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