United Christians

After another six months of sleep-deprived internship at Queen Mary Hospital (QMH), during which a classmate in the same ward came down with pulmonary tuberculosis, we had to decide where to go for our post-graduate medical training. I didn’t know it at the time, but the decision would lead me to work in the United Christian Hospital (UCH) in Kowloon and witness the tragedies of Dr. Law. In any case, in the early 1980s, most medical graduates would seek three to six years of hospital training in order to pass either of the rigorous tests commonly known as the MRCP (membership of the Royal College of Physicians) and the FRCS (Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons) before entering private practice. These were known as the “final common pathway”, as very few wished to stay in public service due to the huge workload and far lower financial return. 

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However, in June 1982, one of my classmates, Dr. Chan Chee-Hung, telephoned my fellow intern, Dr. Chan Kin-Sang, to report that UCH was struggling and might have to shut down its emergency service because several of its doctors had resigned. Kin-Sang also shared this information with interns of Christian faith at the QMH houseman canteen. Initially, the UCH crisis did not influence my career planning because by that time, despite my earlier misgivings about working in an academic environment, I had already indicated my inclination to Professor David Todd to accept his invitation to join the internal medicine unit at QMH after I would have served a one-year posting in emergency medicine at another regional hospital. 

Moreover, it was commonly accepted that it would be difficult to pass the MRCP or FRCS examinations with the training available in a small non-teaching hospital such as UCH, and hard also to live comfortably with the compensation paid by poorly funded peripheral hospitals, which, unlike QMH, could not offer housing allowances, the biggest component of the typical Hong Kong household budget. However, Kin-Sang laid down a challenge. QMH did not need me because all the distinction students would choose QMH, but the poor and underprivileged in Kwun Tong and other areas of Kowloon really needed us. As Christians, we had the duty to help them. 

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I admit I struggled making this potentially very fateful decision. But, miraculously, four of us (Kin-Sang, Dr. Lau Fei-Lung, Dr. Chan Chee-Hung, and I) decided to go to UCH. Because I could not remember ever beig there, we went to visit the hospital first, on one evening by bus from QMH to the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) station and then to Kwun Tong and a short taxi trip; with 450 beds, it was about one-third the size of QMH. My initial impression was positive, although I was rather unimpressed by the chief internal medicine, Dr. Russell Clark, an Australian missionary. With his back facing us , he mumbled on for one hour in a strong Australian English accent. I could not understand a single world. Two years later, before returning to Australia, he told us that he had actually been praying that, while speaking to us, just one of us would come to UCH so that the emergency room would not have to close. He was amazed when all four of us did. 

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We started on a rotational schedule among the three units of internal medicine, pathology, and emergency medicine, where the need for doctors was most acute. We had to respond to some occasional urgent calls from the psychiatry, pediatric intensive care, the orthopedic units. After two years, I was rotated to the surgical unit. The UCH work atmosphere was very good. Relationships between staff at our level were more than cordial, as there was nothing to fight for ecept o give the best patient care with our limited resources. One early morning in 1986, four years after I had taken that exploratory trip to UCH after deciding to work there, I was gazing out a window of my UCH quarters overlooking the large playground and housing estate below. I suddenly recollected that Kin-Sang had brought two classmates and me to UCH in 1977, just one year after we entered medical school. 

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We met with a missionary doctor from Malaysia, Dr. Ong Say-Gark, who worked in the emergency unit. From a small path of green on a rise outside UCH that provided a view of a low-cost public housing estate below, he spoke of the large number of poor families living with shared toilets and cooking in open corridors, and pointed to a large car junkyard which later became a public playground. Dr. Ong’s vision for Kwun Tong was to serve and evangelize this neglected community of immigrants from mainland China. He told us, ‘We are Christian first, and then a medical doctor.’ Before we departed, we prayer, and I silently said to God that I would be willing to serve the poor and underprivileged here if He wanted me to do so. Being a young Christian affected by many distractions, I had forgotten about my prayer and this visit, until now. My faith is small, but perhaps His memory and power are infinite.

More about the author:

Prof. Yuen Kwok-yung served as a physician and later a surgeon at United Christian Hospital for six years before joining the department of microbiology with research at Queen Mary Hospital. During the global SARS outbreak in 2003, he led his team to the discovery of the SARS coronavirus, earning recognition as one of the "Asian Heroes of the Year" in the April 2013 issue of Time Asia. As an esteemed microbiologist, physician, and surgeon, he has been designated a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate and is recognized among the top one percent of the most influential scholars globally.

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His memoir, My Life in Medicine, is now available.