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Penang-born and -based physician Dr Wu Lien-teh was honoured by Google Doodles today, 10 March, for his birthday in 1879.
Dr Wu’s Google Doogle showing his very first prototype masks that saved countless frontliners from the Manchurian plague.
(Credit: Google)
It’s only fitting that he should make a comeback, 60 years after his death, in the midst of a pandemic, because this Penang doctor pretty much
invented the face masks we use everyday now.
In the late 1910s, a deadly plague spread through Manchuria with a 100% fatality rate. Dr Wu correctly identified that the plague was spreading through the air, and not through fleas as previously suspected.