Masked Hero: How Wu Lien-teh Invented the Mask That Ended an Epidemic

Meet Dr. Wu Lien-teh, defeater of the Manchurian plague—in a story authored by his great-granddaughter, an emergency physician who relied on his life-saving invention during a pandemic a century later.

More than a hundred years before Covid, a deadly pneumonic plague threatened to sweep through Northeast China. Medical experts were summoned to help contain it—among them Wu Lien-teh, who had overcome hurdles to be a doctor since his boyhood in Malaysia. Unlike others, Dr. Wu deduced the dise...