Chinese Medical Graduates Serve In American Hospitals
By Frank Miles
(Daily Times Herald War Correspondent)
Kumming, China (IDPA) -- An army station hospital here is the only U.S. military facility in which Chinese students in medicine serve as interns. This practice, the commanding officer told me, is producing excellent results for present and future relations between China and the United States.
Courses in medicine, surgery, pharmacy, laboratory, dentistry, x-ray, sanitation and field medical services are conducted by American officers and enlisted personnel for the Chinese, who respond excellently.
The hospital has a threefold purpose of caring for serious illness of American soldiers in China, serving as an evacuation medium and treating wounded. It is a collection of well constructed one-story brick and bamboo buildings surrounded by cypress tress. Flowers which adorn the grounds, were grown from seeds shipped from the States. First patients were flyers of the famous American volunteer group, whom the Chinese admiringly call the Flying Tigers. Besides thousands of American patients, British, French, Russian and Chinese and Japanese prisoners have been treated here.
Captain Myrtle Dahl, Thomson, chief nurse, is proud of the award of a meritorious service unit plaque to the institution. She is a graduate of Des Moines' Lutheran hospital and served four years at Broadlawns there before entering the army. Captain Dahl has been overseas 19 months. Along with army nurses under her supervision is a group of Sisters of Charity, American Catholic missionaries driven from their posts in China by invading Japanese.
T/3 Robert L. Sullivan, Panama, Iowa, is chief of the enlisted men in the personnel section. T/3 Walter W. Totemeier, Mt. Union, and T/4 Lemar R. Strah, Fort Madison, are the other Iowans on duty there.
I met T/3 Robert Cross, of Logan, with 27 months in China; Second Lieutenant Ambrose Le Riger, Mattoon , Ill., who was born at Sloan, and Major Harry Johnson, Fort Collins, Colo., a native of Iowa and a graduate of Iowa State college, who was on leave from his veterinary surgery chair at Colorado State college, and whose father-in-law, H.B. Sturtevant, was publisher of the Armstrong Journal; Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Miller, Bedford and Sioux City.
Source: Carroll Daily Times Herald, August 3, 1945
