Additional information comes from sources that are likely to be trustworthy, especially since different observers are in pretty good agreement. For example, a report datelined March 2, 1969, by the Canadian journalist Colin McCullough, tells us that in 1949 there were eight medical schools in all of China, and only 20,000 doctors trained in Western medicine. By 1964 the number of schools had risen to eighty and there were 450,000 doctors, surgeons, dentists, nurses, and other medical personnel. In that year, 1964, there were 90,000 medical students. China continues to make use of partly trained "barefoot doctors" as well as of aspects of traditional or non Western medicine; but according to this account, which was reprinted in the New York Times, they function mainly in the countryside and mainly in emergencies, and "probably confine their attention to relatively simple cases."

The English doctor, J. S. Horn, whose book Away with All Pests (1969) I have spoken of before, gives a good deal of space to the means used to extend health care to the farthest reaches of China. Although the number of physicians has been increasing there, it has remained far below the need. The Chinese have sought to meet this problem by giving brief but intensive training to very large numbers of auxiliary medical personnel. Dr. Horn calls these people "peasant doctors." After three years of secondary school they receive six months' training in the elements of medicine and surgery and are then sent back to work among their own people. They provide emergency services and, perhaps more important, they arrange for prompt attention by fully trained doctors when they meet problems that are too much for their small competence. Among Dr. Horn's many details, some that I found most fascinating point to a kind of medical practice oriented primarily toward the patient, whoever or wherever he may be, which is in marked contrast to the medical practice most of us know. Today's scientific medicine, which is undoubtedly far more advanced technically than China's although Dr. Horn is convincing in assuring us that they are far from primitive is admitted even by our doctors to be oriented primarily toward research or teaching. As patients, whether in hospital or clinic or the doctor's office, we are seldom encouraged to feel that we are being looked at as anything but problems rather than people. And so it is possible that the Chinese do not have as much as we do of that tendency to run away when the problem is a personal one. (see VD CONTROL MUST EMPHASIZE MORALS MORE THAN MICROBES PART IX)