Notes on Practicing Medicine in the 1960S: Plant Ash and Penicillin

Lin Xia, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology in the 21st century, died suddenly of a myocardial infarction and traveled through time to become a "youthful" doctor in the Hongqi Commune in northwest China in 1965. Faced with the lack of medical treatment in adobe health clinics, the raging epidemic of diphtheria and "fever disease", she put away the shadowless lamps of modern hospitals, used sewing needles as acupuncture instruments, used plant ash to precipitate cotton oil toxins, and cultivated penicillin under a kerosene lamp using native methods.