Handscroll; ink and colour on paper

引首：29 x 68 cm. 11 3/8 x 26 3/4 in. 約1.8平尺 畫：29 x 68 cm. 11 3/8 x 26 3/4 in. 約1.8平尺 後跋：29 x 291 cm. 11 3/8 x 114 1/2 in. 約7.6平尺

Signed Zhang Yuan, Shanzi, Wu Hufan, Gongchuo, with seven artist seals.
Tang Erhe, Medical Revolutionary 湯爾和：醫學革命者 （1878-1940）
Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Tang Erhe received a classical education at the Cultivating Uprightness Academy 養正書院 where he developed strong anti-Manchu sentiments and studied European revolutionary ideas through translations of works by Montesquieu and Rousseau. Tang received a scholarship to study in Japan where he studied at a military preparatory school. He later returned to China and worked to overthrow the Qing government with other activists like Zhang Binglin 章炳麟, Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉, and Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培. He returned to Japan to study and graduate from Kanazawa Medical School 金澤醫學. After graduating, Tang went back to China in 1910 to establish a medical school in his native Hangzhou, participated in the Revolutionary events of 1911 there and as part of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China in Hankou, including personally presenting the certificate of office to Dr. Sun Yat-sen on January 1, 1912. At this point Tang shifted from political revolution to medical revolution.
After the founding of the new Republic, Tang Erhe advocated for immediate investment in medical education, arguing a modern nation required public health and health care to make its people strong. He asked for a network of government-funded medical schools, but instead was given support and funding from the new Minister of Education to establish a single modern national medical school in Beijing. While the initial facilities were humble, Tang worked tirelessly to build this medical school, now known as Peking University Health Science Center 北京大學醫學部.
Establishing a single medical school was not enough, Tang sought to establish the conditions under which modern medicine could flourish and play a significant role in re-establishing China's sovereignty and leading position in the world. Tang used his proximity to the government to advocate that China establish an anatomy law--the first time regular, investigative and educational human dissection became legal in China's long history. When his medical school still found it difficult to acquire enough cadavers for anatomical training, he established an annual burial ritual attended by all staff and students of the university, as well as any surviving relatives or friends of the donors. This ritual survived at least from 1913 until 1945, but has been forgotten even as a similar ritual has been re-established in Taiwan and mainland China in recent years. Tang was a leading figure in establishing a professional association for Chinese physicians trained in Japan and worked together with the missionary and Anglo-American-trained physicians on many projects including the committee established to standardize the Chinese terminology for modern science. Just as fellow revolutionary Wu Zhihui helped establish the modern pronunciation for Chinese, so Tang was a leading figure in establishing the terminology for medicine, beginning with anatomy.
As chancellor of a major government institution in Beijing during the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Tang Erhe played a key role in supporting student protestors against a reactionary government. Tang then took a sabbatical to conduct research on histology in Germany. He turned leadership of the medical school over to others, and when he returned to China he supported himself through the translation of many Japanese and German books related to anatomy, physiology, general medicine, and other subjects. He supported the growth of medicine in China from various government positions in the 1920s and 1930s, seeking to transform the structural limitations he had run into as a mere medical leader.
Although Tang Erhe was not primarily a researcher, he trained and mentored many students who went on to earn research degrees in Japan, Germany and beyond, including his own son, Tang Qi 湯器 (Yousong幼松), who became a researcher and professor at Peking University School of Medicine and later wrote a biography of his father, Tang Erhe, Teacher湯爾和先生 (1942).
Tang Erhe's medical legacy could be told by tracing the careers of hundreds and thousands of Chinese physicians trained at medical schools he established at a time when China's ratio of physicians to the general population was a mere fraction of that in developed countries. Each graduate in turn played a role in healing and preventing disease and suffering amongst thousands of Chinese people. But Tang Erhe's medical legacy also reached throughout all of China because of the role he played in translating important medical books into Chinese, in establishing a standardized terminology for medical disciplines, and in fighting for a law that would allow anatomical investigation to become the basis of the new medicine in China. Echoing his anti-monarchical youth, Tang Erhe became a true medical revolutionary seeking to establish a modern medical system to support a strong government in China.
David Luesink, Ph.D. 魯大偉
Assistant Professor
Sacred Heart University
Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Price estimate:
HKD: 9,000,000 - 12,000,000
USD: 1,153,800 - 1,538,500

Auction Result:
HKD: --