Tu Tsung-ming

Tu Tsung-ming, circa 1921.

Tu Tsung-ming ( Chinese  杜聰明 , Pinyin Dù Cōngmíng ; born August 25, 1893 in Sanzhi (then part of Tamsui ), Taiwan , Chinese Empire ; † February 25, 1986 in Taipei , Republic of China (Taiwan) ) was the first doctor and Professor of Medicine of Taiwan.

Education

Tu belonged to the first generation of Taiwanese youth to go through the school system introduced by the Japanese . In 1909 he enrolled at the Taiwan School of Medicine , the forerunner of today's Faculty of Medicine at the National University of Taiwan , and graduated in 1914 as the best in his class. A year later he went to study at the Imperial University of Kyoto in Japan , where he obtained a doctorate in medicine on December 16, 1922. He was the first Taiwanese to obtain a doctorate in the modern, western-style Japanese education system.

Teaching

Taihoku University

After his return to Taiwan he worked as a lecturer and from 1937 as a professor at the medical faculty of the Imperial Taihoku University (today: National Taiwan University ). He was the first Taiwanese professor in the Japanese education system. Tus specialties were pharmacology and toxicology .

National Taiwan University

After the Japanese withdrew in 1945 and Taiwan's handover to the Republic of China , Tu was initially the only Taiwanese to be appointed to the handover committee that was supposed to prepare the takeover of the province by the Chinese government. After Taihoku University was renamed “National Taiwan University”, Tu Tsung-ming was appointed the first dean of the medical faculty, but was temporarily forced to do so after the incident on February 28, 1947 following the persecution of Taiwanese intellectuals and scientists by the Kuomintang Army to give up. Tu went into hiding, but was able to return to the university in 1948 and again assumed the office of dean of the medical faculty. Dean Tu survived the following years of White Terror under the Kuomintang dictatorship, during which a number of colleagues from his faculty were dismissed, arrested and even executed.

Kaohsiung Medical College

One year after leaving Taiwan National University in 1953, Tu founded the Kaohsiung Medical College (now: Kaohsiung Medical University ), which he headed from 1954 until his retirement in 1966.

After his retirement, Tu lived in Taipei, where he died on February 25, 1986 at the age of 92. The Tsungming Tu Prize , which has been awarded annually since 2007 by the National Science Council in cooperation with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation , is named after him .

Web links

• Short biography on the website of the National Science Council (Taiwan) ( Memento from December 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
• 120th Anniversary Report, China Times, August 20, 2013

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Tu is the family name here, Tsung-ming is the first name.