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Two and a half years ago, Chang Chao Hsu was an agricultural worker in a commune east of Peking. Today he is the surgeon performing a gastrectomy at the number one teaching hospital in Tientsin. In the next operating room, a torn lateral meniscus is being removed by second-year medical student, Ho Chen Shui. A year and a half ago she was working in a rug factory. Both operations are being done with the assistance of acupuncture for control of pain.
It will be recognized immediately that things are different in China, although at the technical level Chinese major surgical management is much like American surgery. In other medical disciplines, dissimilarities tend to be more marked.
Our delegation of 12 physicians, over a period of 21 days in China, in seven major cities and a wide assortment of institutions, had the chance to see a great many Chinese surgeons in