Great as are heaven and earth, what we owe to the Party is greater;
dear as are father and mother, Chairman Mao is dearer!
The deaf-mute students have boundless love for Chairman Mao
and cherish infinite loyalty to him.

Under the guidance of the great thought of Mao Tse-tung, the Mao Tse-tung's thought medical team of the Chinese P.L.A. Unit 3125 treated 105 students of the Fuhsien School for Deaf-Mutes in Liaoning Province, enabling all of them to recover their hearing and speaking faculties. Now everyone of them can cheer "Long live Chairman Mao!" and recite quotations from Chairman Mao. After some training many can already sing The East Is Red and recite Chairman Mao's "good old three" articles. This is a tremendous achievement gained in the upsurge of struggle-criticismtransformation of the great proletarian cultural revolution.

In June 1968, following Chairman Mao's directive "In medical and health work, put the stress on the rural areas", this unit sent a Mao Tse-tung's thought medical team to the school. The team, composed of two army doctors, a dispenser and three medical assistants arrived at the school, bringing along with them the revolutionary treasured books by Chairman Mao.

Quite a few deaf-mutes in this school had previously been treated in big city hospitals, but none had been cured. The comrades of the medical team were determined to cure them. They studied Chairman Mao's teaching: "You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history!" and carried out an all-round investigation into the causes of each case, paying visits to the students' families, holding meetings together with their relatives, and so on.

At the home of the deaf-mute student Wang Chung-ming, Mother Wang grievously told the medical team the tragic stories of how both her own mother and her son bad become deafmutes. She said, "My grandparents were so poor that they were forced to beg for food, taking my mother with them from the time she was little. Once on a bitter cold winter day she fell ill on the road with a high fever. The family had no money to send her to a doctor, and from then on she was a mute. The man-eating old society incapacitated her for life. After liberation, the arch criminal Liu Shao-chi desperately pushed his counter-revolutionary revisionist line in medical and health work. Hospital doors were still not open to us poor and lower-middle peasants. Once my son Chung-ming, at the age of four, suddenly fell ill with a high fever. At that time, we lacked doctors and medicine in the countryside. His fever lasted more than ten days. When his temperature returned to normal, he could no longer hear, nor could he speak. His father took him to a big hospital in Talien. They waited for two whole days before they could even get to see a doctor. When this "distinguished" doctor examined the boy's ears, which were filled with bad-smelling pus, he shrank back muttering, "The eardrums are damaged, He can't be cured." Father and son were thus sent from the hospital.

Vivid facts kindled the raging fire of class hatred in the hearts of the medical team members. With profound proletarian feelings for their class brothers, they plunged into the battle to cure deaf-mutes.

Chairman Mao teaches us, "Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved." The medical workers first investigated to find out which of the two, deafness or mutism, was the principal contradiction. They discovered the overwhelming majority of the deaf-mutes were deaf but could utter sounds like "Ah..., ah..." Generally speaking, they were first deaf, then mute. The condition was usually caused by some disease suffered by the patient when he or she was around two or three years old. The medical team reached the conclusion: The principal contradiction is in deafness; mutism is brought on by deafness.

While comprehensively analyzing their experiences in using acupuncture to cure deafmutes, the team members at the same time began a battle to locate new acupuncture points for curing deaf-mutes by experimenting on their own bodies. The six members of the medical team with the treasured red books in their hands stood in front of Chairman Mao's portrait and solemnly pledged: "Chairman Mao! In order to carry out your instruction, we are willing to sacrifice our lives. In order to thoroughly emancipate our deaf-mute class brothers, we are willing to injure our own bodies in carrying out repeated experiments in acupuncture." They carried out experiments day and night in an effort to find a new cure as quickly as possible, trying the needles out on each other as well as on themselves with the aid of a mirror. Each time, they recorded the location of the points, the depth and amount of twist given the needle, as well as the direction of the resulting reaction. From this data they worked out methods.

When medical assistant Chang Cheng-chun's mouth was so sore from the experiments that he could hardly open it any more, he recited Chairman Mao's teaching, "Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory" as he resolutely went on with still another try. Li Nai-min, leader of the medical team, had inserted the needle in one point on his own body over 50 times in order to determine the function of acupuncture at this new point. After repeated experiments, the team, finding two points which are quite effective in curing deafness, at last discovered a new method for curing deaf-mutes. After 20 days' treatment, 80 per cent of the students had recovered their ability to hear and could cheer "Long live Chairman Mao!"

Tsui Shu-chin, a girl student who was still not cured at the time became quite impatient and cried. In sign language, she said to team leader Li Nai-min, "I want to shout: Long live Chairman Mao!" Deeply moved, he consoled her, saying, "We are determined to cure your illness as soon as possible!" Late that night, Li lay in bed thinking over Tsui Shu-chin's request, unable to sleep. He switched on the light and began carefully going over her case history. Chairman Mao's teaching - from the particular to the general and from the general to the particular - came to his mind. He discovered that in the treatment of Shu-chin he had not paid enough attention to the particularity of her case. The next day, he also treated her with acupuncture for the woman's disorder she was suffering from. After three successive treatments, she regained her hearing.

In a little over two months, all the 105 students of the school recovered their ability to hear and to speak. This is a great victory of Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line in medical and health work, a victory of Mao Tse-tung's thought.