Every time I think of my father, I ask myself, "He painted all his life, which picture is the best?" The answer is immediately available: Cooperative medical care is good.
Why is the answer so quick? Because I don't like my father's pictures. Probably because the portraits are
not good-looking, the lines are stiff, the colors are awkward, and there is no sense of ease after rigorous
training of the academy. Not only that, the people in those paintings are the people in my father's hometown town, the dress is rustic, even the trees in the painting are the hometown's unique orange trees, my mother used to laugh at him: "All the people you paint are like your town!"
I was six years old when I saw this picture. We haven't seen each other in 40 years. So, I began to search
for the picture of "cooperative medical care" on the Internet, with no results. Luckily, there was a picture in my phone that my dad had sent me, and he said he had seen it in an online second-hand book store. So I followed that lead and ran it through image search -- and it turned up two: a vegetarian restaurant blog that chose this picture, with the caption: "1961 Vegetarian restaurant." Another Post, in Little Red Booksomeone left a comment: "The people in this picture all look healthy and much better looking than Japanese manga." The post also provided a source of information: a photo book published in Hong Kong. Oh, my God, I thought my brain was the only one on Earth that could record it!
Why do I describe this poster as a tourist map? Because it depicts 12 scenes in and out of a small rural
clinic: outside the clinic, where various herbs are planted, a farmer is introducing a group of herbs to two
young female students; The two girls, each carrying a bamboo basket, filled with newly harvested herbs,
returned happily; Just at the entrance of the clinic, a college student wearing a "medical university" vest
was transported by a local farmer in a stylish tractor, he looked self-satisfied, while the tractor driver and
his partner enthusiastically helped him carry his simple luggage, while another group of young people carrying bamboo baskets with their newly harvested herbs had already entered the hospital. In the hospital courtyard, a group of children are very happy to wait for the vaccine, no one is the slightest bit afraid; On the right side of the courtyard, a medicine man dried herbs on a large bamboo flat, while his colleagues cut and packaged them in a back room. On the outside wall of the pharmacy, there are drawings of the huma body, and it is a medical knowledge popularization group that is learning. Inside the hospital, the female doctor with a stethoscope is treating the little boy, and the little boy wearing the sea shirt actively pulls up his shirt. In the middle of the picture, a young woman doctor carrying a medicine chest is on her way out. She confidently descends the steps, the red umbrella in her hand and the black sandals on her feet indicate that she will walk through some muddy nearby roads in the summer wind and rain to deliver medicine to distant homes.
The big picture, which consists of 12 scenes, completely fails to adhere to the principle of perspective: the people in the foreground are almost the same size as the people behind them, and the scenes have no dialogue with each other. Obviously, this is a very deliberate combination of scenes, which is what kind of motivation, conception, composition method?
So, I turned to the People's Daily in the 1970s, and it said that the picture of "cooperative medical care" described by the newspaper was the same as that described by my mother. In order to solve the problem of manpower shortage, hospital doctors are sent to the countryside to train farmers to become "barefoot doctors", so that they have the ability to solve common diseases; There are also some interesting news reports about the glorious deeds of donating ancestors' secret recipes. For example, in order to celebrate the victory of the Ninth National Congress, a person donated a special snake medicine passed down by his ancestors for 38 years, and an old poor farmer proposed to treat dysentery with Chinese herbs such as dandelion and yellow cedar. Accustomed to being suspicious of all the social movements in the newspapers, I called my mother to ask.
Me: "Is this cooperative medical treatment actually very bad?" So you don't hear it anymore."
My mother answered without thinking: "Very good! Every morning, carrying a box of medicine, I had to climb a mountain over which there were some villages. I'll see them, I'll give them medicine. One farmer's symptoms appeared to be pneumonia, I gave him tetracycline, stayed in his house for two nights, and his illness was cured. Their family went to the mountains to shoot a pheasant and made a bowl of chicken soup for me to drink."
Me: "Why don't farmers have chickens?"
Mother: "At that time, it was a collective economy, and you were not allowed to raise chickens in your home."
Me: "So how do they pay for the medicine?"
Mom: "No need to pay, I will go to a government agency to get medicine." But it was easier to treat then than it is now!"
Hong Kong rare book publishing company will "cooperative medical care" as a "propaganda picture" included, literally understood, "propaganda picture" is a poster for policy publicity. But I think the Poster my father drew is not a typical Poster, because the poster has a strong impact and does not need to be told. "Cooperative Medical Care" is an InfoGraphic hidden in the landscape, showing the specific content of the "cooperative medical care" advocated by the government, starting from the bottom of the picture to describe the workflow: self-sourcing, self-planting, self-made Chinese herbal medicine, vaccine injection, doctor training, diagnosis and house visits. This scene, there is no obvious timeline, flow chart, so that readers can slowly see, just like browsing a multi-page picture book, involuntarily into the time and space that feels "the future is very good". This is probably my favorite painting of my childhood, right? In the process of searching for "cooperative health care", I found many posters with the theme of cooperative health care movement. In other words, posters are undoubtedly a powerful tool to solve social movements. For example, when an epidemic broke out in Changwu County, Liaoning province, in 1972, the solution described in the newspaper was to immediately print 4,000 posters and post them in rural battalons, sending out disease prevention messages to 320,000 people. In other words, it was a time when painters were in great demand, and they could get jobs. This is something that makes their wives particularly happy and proud, mom said: "After the publication of Cooperative Medical Care, Dad got 30 yuan of manuscript fees, and we bought a new bed sheet for the first time!"
In China today, people under the age of 50 May never have heard of the concept of "barefoot doctors" and cooperative medical care. My mother, who carried a medicine box to the mountains to see a patient, was a surgeon in a large hospital. The hospital where she works is as crowded as the airport at Christmas, and family members from rural areas, Tibet, and small and medium-sized cities sit wearily waiting for their numbers to be called on the big screen. And doctors, trained in "high-speed diagnosis," dismiss the checklist before the patient feels "they haven't finished." Why did "cooperative care" disappear? I'm not sure if China has summed up the success or failure of this campaign; Would American hospitals be better? Some American hospitals do seem more comfortable and reassuring, but there are accelerators hidden in the doctor's conversation skills, and the worst is that meeting with a young ophthalmologist can only talk for 10 minutes, I paid 130 dollars, while China only costs 5 dollars. I'm curious if farmers in rural America need "barefoot doctors"? What can China and the United States, today's rivals, learn from each other?
For the last two years, Dad has enjoyed generating images with mid-Journey. Unfortunately, I forgot to encourage him to redraw a map of collaborative healthcare using the AI-generated mapping tool, again from the bottom up. Promt looks like this: biotech LABS, then big pharmaceutical companies with patent rights, then up, maybe a big pharmaceutical factory in India, China, and at the top of the picture are several different types of hospitals: some patients have access to the latest development of drugs: what about the discovery of some magical power in plants? This power is super, not only can prevent, cure, but also allow Dad to come home from heaven.
Some patients may queue outside the hospital for a clinic number. However, where should pharmaceutical investment companies and insurance companies be drawn?
"Cooperative Medical good" may not be a dream, maybe, maybe, AI technology can help us find some magical power from plants? This power is super, not only can prevent, cure, but also allow Dad to come home from heaven.
