A Country Doctor's Free Remedies

On a stormy night, a farmer’s wife was bitten by a snake. He sucked out the venom and bled the Weizhong acupoint, saving her half an hour before the county hospital ambulance arrived. The town doctor called his methods “unorthodox,” but he used mugwort he’d dried himself to ease the village Party secretary’s decade-old leg pain. And for just 35 yuan, he cured a child’s indigestion that Western medicine hadn’t managed to fix for 280.

In village doctor Li Erzhu’s clinic, an old Laoganma jar served as a cupping cup, and medicinal “weeds” grew in the backyard. A letter announcing that his son had secretly applied to study Western medicine lay hidden beneath his battered copy of The Barefoot Doctor’s Journal. When the epidemic hit, he turned the clinic into a communal soup kitchen and shelter. Even the county’s expert team came to copy his “folk remedies.” The town hospital offered him a permanent position with a salary of 150,000 yuan a year, but the villagers showed up at his door in the middle of the night, clutching a letter covered in their red fingerprints. He treated their illnesses, but what he truly protected was the hope that people in the mountains would never have to worry about getting medical care.