Sat, Jan 31, 2015 page3

• Doctor who survived A-bomb and 228 dies at 98

  LIFE OF CHEATING DEATH: Wang Wen-chi was 700m from the Nagasaki explosion. He returned to Taiwan to be arrested during the Massacre for treating a wounded man

  • Staff writer, with CNA
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  Retired Taiwanese medical doctor Wang Wen-chi (王文其), who survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, has died at 98.

  Wang died of sepsis at his home in Chiayi City on Tuesday after surgery to treat an inflamed bile duct, his family said.

  Wang was a young physician in Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan by the US during World War II exploded just 700m from the hospital where he was working as an intern.

  

  Retired Taiwanese medical doctor Wang Wen-chi, center, who survived the atom bomb of Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, is informed that he will receive ￥1.1 million (US$9,300) from the Japanese government in Chiayi on Mar 15, 2012.

  Photo: CNA

  He was badly injured, but was rescued and treated, so that he recovered to a state that allowed him to fly back to Taiwan the year after the bombing.

  Dubbed a miracle, Wang lived on in good health, without signs of radioactivity-caused sequelae. He fathered seven healthy children, three of whom also became doctors.

  His son Wang Po-tung (王柏東) said his father had escaped death twice — the first time in Nagasaki and the second time in Taiwan in 1947, when an anti-government uprising led to the 228 Massacre.

  That year, Wang Wen-chi was arrested and put on trial after he treated a wounded bank manager from China the day after the start of the uprising and the ensuing bloody crackdown on tens of thousands of demonstrators by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops.

  Fortunately, the judge was one of his high-school classmates, who quietly set him free, Wang said.

  “We didn’t expect him to succumb to his illness,” Wang Po-tung said. “After all, he had cheated death twice.”

  His father had always told them about the horror of war, which turned him into an anti-war and anti-nuclear advocate, he said.

  In May 2012, Wang Wen-chi won a lawsuit and received ￥1.1 million (US$9,300) from the Japanese government in symbolic compensation for war-induced damage and losses. He donated it to socially disadvantaged groups.

  “I got the money for what happened in my life. Now I want it to have the biggest possible impact,” Wang Wen-chi was quoted as telling his children.

  At the age of 18, Wang Wen-chi traveled to Japan to study. He was an intern at the Hospital of Nagasaki Medical College — now part of Nagasaki University — on Aug. 9, 1945, when the US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.

  He passed out at the hospital after seeing a bright flash of light, and upon regaining consciousness, found fires raging and dead bodies around him.

  He crawled outside to find help before fainting again, Wang Wen-chi said in interviews over the years. He was then told that three Japanese women found him and took him to a Taiwanese doctor, he said.

  Wang was in a coma for a week. In addition to suffering burns, he was hit in the abdomen by shrapnel and was passing blood in his urine and stools.

  An estimated 70,000 people were killed in Nagasaki that day. It followed a similar attack on Hiroshima three days earlier. Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15.

  Wang returned in 1946, along with his wife and child, to his hometown of Chiayi, where he opened a clinic.

  He once said he considered himself lucky to not only survive, but to be blessed with good health and a long life.

  “The only consequence is that I set off beepers when I pass through security checkpoints at airports because of the radioactivity in my body,” Wang said.

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