What happens
Dr. Bent, a visiting inspector, joins Dr. Cheng Wu at a brigade hospital in caves on the Chinese front in 1945, where the surgeon operates with improvised tools and little light. Bent recalls Cheng Wu as a medical student who planned to teach doctors who would serve China's vast population. The program then follows the wartime struggle to deliver medicine across China, from a frontline receiving hospital and a mule-borne Red Cross unit to a medical college where students spin cotton into bandages. It also covers shortages of drugs, a plague scare in a village, and a Chongqing medical convention debating how China can build its own public health system. The program is part of the United Nations Pacific Story series, which NBC broadcast in 1946.
China during the Sino-Japanese war, from the 1937 fall of Peiping to the 1945 front lines and postwar medical planning
Characters: Dr. Bent, Cheng Wu, Captain Fong, Lieutenant Jap, Dr. Lee, Professor Chu
Listen for: The contrast between the wartime front-line hospitals and the postwar plans for public health in China
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.