Wu Mengchao

Wu Mengchao a Chinese surgeon (1922-2021) regarded as the father of hepatobiliary surgery in China, who pioneered operations on the liver and devised techniques and instruments that made liver surgery possible in a country with one of the highest rates of liver cancer in the world.

Early Life and Education

Wu Mengchao was born on 22 August 1922 in Minqing county, Fujian province, into a poor family. His father died when he was a small child, and his mother raised the family under difficult conditions. He was a gifted student, and with the help of relatives and of a scholarship he was able to continue his education beyond the limits that poverty would ordinarily have imposed.

In 1940 he entered Tongji Medical College, then located in Kunming, and qualified as a doctor in 1949 after years of study disrupted by the war with Japan and the subsequent civil war. The medical school had been moved inland before the Japanese advance, and his training took place under the improvised and austere conditions of wartime China.

He then trained in surgery and worked in a series of hospitals, and in 1956 he joined the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, an institution with which he was associated for the rest of his life. He became a military surgeon and later a professor, and he devoted himself to the then almost unexplored field of surgery on the liver.

Founding Hepatobiliary Surgery in China

In the 1950s and 1960s Wu Mengchao worked to develop liver surgery in a country where liver disease was extremely common. He studied the anatomy of the liver in great detail, producing casts and models of the blood vessels and bile ducts that revealed the segmental structure of the organ and made it possible to plan operations on parts of it rather than removing it whole.

On the basis of this anatomy he devised new procedures for removing tumours from the liver, and he taught the techniques to surgeons throughout the country. He became famous for operations on enormous liver tumours, some of them among the largest ever removed, and for the precision and speed of his work in the operating theatre.

He trained a generation of surgeons in the specialty he had founded, and the centres he built became the principal source of hepatobiliary expertise in China. His operating techniques and his doctrine of careful anatomical dissection spread through the national surgical community and reduced the risks that had previously made liver operations among the most dangerous of all.

Technique and Innovation

Wu Mengchao contributed a long list of technical innovations to liver surgery. He simplified the difficult manoeuvre of clamping the blood supply to the liver during an operation, and he developed improved methods for dividing the organ along its natural planes and for controlling bleeding from its dense network of vessels.

He designed surgical instruments and improvised devices that made liver operations safer, and he was celebrated for solving practical problems with simple means. One of his instruments, a retractor that he adapted for the exposure of the liver, became standard equipment in Chinese operating theatres, and it was named after him.

He described the liver's segmental anatomy in a widely used classification and used it to plan resections that preserved as much healthy tissue as possible. His insistence on anatomical precision and on the systematic study of each operation as a lesson for the next became the method by which the specialty advanced in China.

Leadership and Teaching

Wu Mengchao served as president of the Second Military Medical University and led the Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital in Shanghai, which became the largest centre of its kind in the country. Under his direction the institution trained hundreds of specialists and carried out research on liver cancer, hepatitis and transplantation.

He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991, and he received numerous national awards and honorary degrees. He continued to operate into his eighties and insisted on teaching at the bedside, telling younger doctors that each patient was a teacher and that the only way to learn surgery was to do it under supervision and reflect upon it.

His teaching was marked by a demand for diligent study, careful observation and humility before the patient. He kept detailed records of his operations and reviewed them with his students, and he built a school of surgical practice that emphasised both technical mastery and moral seriousness in the treatment of the sick.

Legacy

Wu Mengchao is widely honoured as the founder of Chinese hepatobiliary surgery. His work helped to make operable a class of tumours that had previously been considered hopeless, and the specialty he established now treats many thousands of patients each year in China and beyond.

He died on 22 May 2021 in Shanghai, at the age of ninety-eight. The hospital he built, the instruments he designed and the surgeons he trained together constitute an enduring legacy, and he was remembered after his death as a benefactor of the country's most common form of cancer.

The state honoured him as a national moral exemplar and as an outstanding scientist, and his name was attached to prizes and to the hospital he led. He stands in the small company of Chinese physicians who founded an entire branch of surgery and who trained the profession that succeeded them.

See also

• Hepatobiliary surgery
• Liver cancer
• Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital