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:
“My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)