In a sense, 0.4 milligram is the most representative portion of yan Renying.
This weight is hidden at the beginning of almost every life in China. Thanks to Yan’s initiative, Pregnant women in China have started to take an oral supplement of 0.4 mg of folic acid daily before and after pregnancy to prevent neural tube abnormalities in newborns. The world Health Organization’s standard of folic acid supplementation was set, and public health policies in more than 60 countries were rewritten.
Before that, Yan’s research found that nearly one in 40 fetuses died during the perinatal period, which is between 28 weeks of pregnancy and one week after giving birth. Among the adverse pregnancy outcomes, the incidence of neural tube malformation was as high as 4.7‰, ranking first.
In 1990, Yan Renying started research on the prevention and treatment of neural tube malformations in infants. That year, she was 77 years old.
There is little way to count how many families her research has saved from the shadow of fetal malformation. And this is not the only “liberation” Yan renying has experienced.
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Yan Renying is the granddaughter of Yan Xiu, founder of Nankai University, and the sister-in-law of Wang Guangmei.
In the memories of his family, Yan renying, who is in her 90s, still demanded to work at the hospital. Every day at work, she would get up an hour earlier than usual, wash, eat breakfast, sit quietly in the living room and wait.
When Yan Renying was 24 years old, she studied with professor Lin Qiaozhi, a famous expert in obstetrics and gynecology. When the new China was just founded, she returned from the United States for further study, and her first job was to examine the bodies of prostitutes who had been taken in. Until the age of 52, she was still in Miyun County, a suburb of Beijing, running a training class to train rural doctors who were “half farmers and half doctors”, while treating gynecological diseases.
During that time, Yan Ran almost all over the Reservoir south and north. At that time, there was not even the most basic inoculation in the countryside, let alone an anatomical model, so Yan Renying could only buy a dog to teach his students anatomy.
Dong Yue, an obstetrician at Peking University First Hospital, went to the countryside to investigate with Yan Renying. “At that time, the idea was that people in the city would come to the hospital after six or seven months of pregnancy, and rural women would come to the hospital after giving birth. But if there were any problems, it would be too late at that time.” Dong yue once saw pregnant women dying from prolonged bleeding in rural Gansu province.
At the age of 70, Yan and her colleagues completed a survey of 1,998 pregnant women in seven townships in Shunyi. It was also at that time that she began to notice the high incidence of fetal neural tube defects in China, and proposed cooperative research using foreign technology and funds and the characteristics of China’s large population.
That was a hundred million yuan collaboration, and research of this scale is rare even today. As the chief scientist, Yan Renying called the American side again and again and took American scientists to visit the grass-roots level. Finally, the cooperation was confirmed.
According to the Report on prevention and Treatment of Birth Defects in China (2012), after more than 20 years of folic acid promotion, neural tube malformations eventually “decreased by 62.4 percent”.
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In the memory of her daughter and son-in-law, Yan Renying and her papers have never “separated”. The most books on her shelves are academic medical journals. When she returned home, she often carried a beige “shopping bag” containing other people’s papers.
She is not the kind of person who likes to “tie herself up” at home. Sometimes the family “didn’t know what she was doing.”
On one occasion, the day before she was due to leave for Germany, she went to a nursery to see her daughter and found the other children being held by their mother, while her own daughter was sitting on a urine bowl tied with a rope. Yan Renying took the child back home to her husband, Wang Guangchao, and left.
In an interview with the media, Yan renying said that his love of running outside may be related to his childhood in the compound’s walls, “always a little wild.”
In the first 12 years of her life, Yan spent almost all of her time inside the high walls of the Yan family compound, practicing big characters and keeping a diary every day. But what Yan Renying wanted to see was the cars and the crowds outside. Behind the walls, she “wanted so much to go out, so much to go out on the street, so much to go out even once to see a doctor.”
Even at the age of 90, she never forgets the songs her grandfather taught her, such as “Goddaughter’s Song” and “Play the Foot Song.” As she spoke, she sang in a hoarse voice: “If you cry to your mother and bind her feet, the daughter of your neighbor has already played her feet.”
She has been to the Korean war to investigate “bacteriological weapons”, and has experienced car rolled-over and two bomb dangers. Later, he joined the Women’s League of China and visited Japan with Xu Guangping, vice president of the All-China Women’s Federation at any time.
She joked that she might have been chosen because she was straight and unbound: “One would think that Chinese women have been liberated, indeed liberated.”
However, when Yan Renying really went out from the high wall of the Yan family courtyard, but found that “there is a wall outside the wall”.
When she was 27, she wanted to stay and work at the Union Hospital. However, according to Yan renying, according to the practice of American hospitals, if female doctors marry, they will have no career development and will often be transferred to the clinic. Lin Qiaozhi, her teacher and the first Chinese director of the department of gynaecology of Peking Union Medical College, was never married.
Although the heart has also struggled, but still decided to follow the path of the teacher. It was only while she was a resident at Concord that the Pacific War broke out, the Japanese invaded, and she lost her job.
Seven years later, her application to study abroad was rejected.
She believes she was rejected “for obvious reasons. Of the five, I am the only married woman with children.” But this time, she did not give in to the “practice”, she found the person in charge, and finally fought for the opportunity to study in the department of obstetrics and gynecology endocrinology of Columbia University in the United States for one year, on the condition of returning to the original unit work for three years.
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Soon, due to the outbreak of the cultural Revolution, Yan Renying was trapped again.
As Wang Guangmei’s sister-in-law, Yan Renying has a “crime” that Liu Shaoqi was inserted into the Peking University Hospital. Yan Renying took off her white gown and put on a blue sanitary suit. She changed from “Doctor Yan” into “Lao Yan” and was arranged to sweep the toilet in the corner of the first floor of the department of obstetrics and gynecology.
Yan renying was black and thin, suffering from hyperthyroidism. Years later, she was described as “Gandhi”.
Yan Renying knows how to survive in bondage. When many people saw Yan Renying in the toilet, they would quietly ask her: “How are you, Dr. Yan?” Other young doctors would run to the toilet and ask Yan in a low voice what to do with some operations and what to do with some situations.
Zhou Qiyuan, Yan’s son-in-law, remembers being told by an old doctor at the hospital that during the Cultural Revolution, when a woman was about to give birth, the family had a disagreement with the doctor. The doctor’s opinion was that the baby would need a C-section because of its size. And the mother’s family did not agree: well, why the stomach to a knife? The dispute is not, the doctor quietly found in the toilet cleaning Yan Renying. Yan renying’s advice: “You can avoid c-sections.”
Eventually the doctor used forceps and the baby was born.
Fortunately, Yan wasn’t tied down for long. Once, yan ran into a former student in the toilet for a follow-up visit. Yan said to her: “I have good news. I am liberated. You can call the department of gynaecology clinic.”
Yan Renying went back to the clinic, this time to see the student herself. Under Yan renying’s care, the student, who has only one ovary, gave birth to a girl two years later.
Yan Ren Ying Yan Ren Ying
After breaking free of the shackles of the cultural Revolution, Yan Renying said she wanted to “change the life of clinical medicine”. She wanted to change from clinical practice to perinatal health care, which was not popular.
In Yan renying’s own words, perinatal is around “before and after childbirth”, with the aim of reducing maternal and newborn mortality and promoting maternal and child health.
She mocks perinatal medicine as a “freak”, a leg out of the clinic, and “everyone knows that you can make money doing clinical work for women and children, and you can’t make a lot of money doing health care.”
In order to persuade others, she often accounts with others: sitting in the hospital, a doctor can see up to 30 people a day, while going to the grass-roots perinatal care work can face hundreds of people a day. “Which makes more sense to prevent hundreds of people from getting sick?”
At the beginning of perinatal business, Yan Renying took a group of doctors from the clinic to “go down to find patients.” Without money for the bus, Yan renying took out the “consulting fee” of 400 yuan to advance the long-distance bus fare.
A group of people ran outside dongzhi gate after 5 am to wait for a bus to Shunyi. But sometimes to the brigade clinic to find pregnant women, pregnant women do not appear, they often want to “touch” home to see them.
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Yan Renying has been doing her best to minimize pain and death for her patients.
But in fact, her relatives were not less bound and entangled by diseases: When she was six years old, Yan Renying’s father died of illness; Junior three, grandfather Yan Xiu also died of a tumor; When she was young, her third brother also dropped out of school all year round because of tuberculosis.
Yan renying and her student Hu Yamei first proposed legislation on euthanasia at the seventh National People’s Congress in 1988. “Birth, aging, illness and death are the natural order of things, but rather than letting some terminally ill patients suffer in pain and suffering, we should let them end their lives legally and peacefully,” Yan wrote in the bill.
Even when her husband, Wang Guangchao, was dying of cancer, Yan Renying did not stubbornly continue to live for him. She shocked those around her by saying, “If my wife dies, I will stop wasting the country’s precious medicines.” “I agree that his autopsy is good for medical development.” “I don’t take it personally. I do it to him, I do it to myself.”
When Wang Guangchao’s ventilator windpipe was pulled out, Yan Renying looked on silently.
At Mr. Wang’s funeral, Yan Renying, 90, did not weep like her daughter. However, after the “goodbye” was over, Yan Renying had to look at her husband’s photos for a while every night and watered the flowers left by Wang Guangchao over and over again, many of which were waterlogging dead.
But 14 years later, when Yan’s life came to an end, no one could decide whether to extubate her. After eight years in a hospital bed, Yan can barely communicate with the outside world. She couldn’t even open her eyes to greet friends when they came.
At 1324 hours on April 16, there was no longer a fine mist on the green respirator. Time has given her a final “liberation” at 104 years old.
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