New Zealand Girl Trains Chinese As Dispensers

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 100, 21 November 1947, Page 6

New Zealand Girl Trains Chinese As Dispensers

A young New Zealander, with little Chinese, teaching a half-skill-ed staff, with little English, to compound and dispense complicated and often dangerous drugs—this, the situation of Miss Betty White of Featherston in Kwangchi Hospital, Hangchow, typifies both China’s acute shortage of medical personnel after eight years of interrupted training, and also the Herculean efforts of Christian missions to institute new training. , “Despite the language handicap,” wrote Miss White recently to Corso, which is supporting her, “my five girl students, with their deft hands and light movements, will quickly make first class dispensers. Each morning I work with them in the dispensary and each afternoon, teach chemistry with the help of experiments and a blackboard and Chinese chemistry books that are the exact duplicates of the English one I uSe. I am Secretary besides of the Medical Committee of the International Relief Committee that distributes drugs through all Chekiang Province—which has a million inhabitants, but desperately little medical EngLhh) on the new drugs for the qualified staff (they have had no chance to learn anything since 1937) and have them translated into Chinese for the nurses also.”