Post War Life
Ma remained a doctor with the Communists until their victory in 1949, afterwards becoming a public health official. He was the first foreigner granted citizenship in the People's Republic of China. He is credited with helping to eliminate leprosy and many venereal diseases in post-war China, for which he received the Lasker Medical Award in 1986. He was one of the few persons who were not born in China to hold a position of trust and authority in the People's Republic of China. His Chinese name can be loosely translated to mean "Horse"(last name) and "Virtue From the Sea"(first name).
He died in China in 1988 and was buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
During his lifetime, he was honored in his city Hammana in Lebanon, where the main square of the city is named after him.
There is an extensive interview with him in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's groundbreaking ninety minute documentary by Patrick Watson, The Seven Hundred Million (1964).
A film about him, showing an American doctor affirming Communist ideology, is broadcast frequently in the People's Republic of China. Consequently, his story is widely known among Mainland Chinese.
Read more about this topic: Ma Haide (George Hatem)
Famous quotes containing the words post, war and/or life:
“Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“Come Vitus, are we men, or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
—Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff)
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)