‘Medical Marco Polo’: the American doctor who fought for lives of Chinese amid chaos of civil war

We share an umbrella as we walk the hilly streets of San Francisco on a drizzly day. It is not ideal weather in which to search for an outdoor statue, and we find to our surprise – on arriving at the correct spot – that a building stands there, with two majestic columns of granite, carved with giant human figures, reaching towards the sky. Today the building is a fitness centre; it was once the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.

But what of the statue? Is this the right place? How could the statue of a man who so passionately advocated socialised medicine stand in so high a temple of capitalism?

Behind one of the columns, hidden by overgrown shrubbery, we find it: the rendering of a short man peering through a microscope. It commemorates Dr Leo Eloesser, a humanitarian whose bond with China spanned decades.

Along with the better-known Norman Bethune, Eloesser was one of 21 foreign doctors who volunteered to work in China having served on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war (1936-39).

A large collection of documents concerning Eloesser – some 50 boxes in all – has been preserved in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, at Stanford University, in the United States, where he served as a professor for 34 years. Among them are his memoirs, correspondence, lecture notes, medical drawings, reports, news clippings and photographs. Together they reveal an extraordinary life.