Costly Service

Robert Wilson was the only surgeon remaining during the Rape of Nanking – a city of a million. Why did he stay in such perilous conditions whilst the Japanese army brutalised the citizens?

“He saw this as his duty. The Chinese were his people,” said his wife. His uncle (John Ferguson) had founded the Unversity of Nanking and he was of a family of Methodist missionaries. He had enrolled at Harvard Medical School after winning a Princeton University scholarship aged 17. He could have cherry-picked the finest of jobs in the US but he worked around the clock under bombardment, atrocities, inadequate medical equipment and supplies and Japanese Army atrocities. On the afternoon of December 13th, whilst performing a delicate eye operation a shell landed fifty yards away shattering the window and spraying the room with shrapnel. The nurses were shocked despite no one being injured. He contnued the operation, “But,” he said, “I don’t think any eyes have come out that fast.”

His home was ransacked and defiled, yet he operated for free since his patients had nothing. His family believe only his faith and love of China preserved him.

adapted from Iris Chang’s, The Rape of Nanking, pp.122-129

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