JOHN DAY, Ore. – When herbalist Ing Hay died at age 89 in 1952, he’d built a reputation for medical cures that some claimed touched on the supernatural.

Now, researchers are wondering whether some of the 1,500 herbal prescriptions left behind by “Doc” Hay in this frontier gold mining town might not contain treatments still undiscovered by 21st century medical practitioners.

A cure for cancer might be too much to hope for – but perhaps not, said Christina Sweet, curator of the Kam Wah Chung and Co. Museum in John Day. “People say he was able to cure about anything.”

The recently refurbished museum is operated by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department in the same fortresslike stone building where Hay lived and worked from 1887 until shortly before his death.

Sweet said representatives of Harvard Medical School and the University of Alabama, among others, recently have expressed interest in the treatments left behind by the “China Doctor.”

Hay “is just the tip of the iceberg of a host of Chinese doctors who were taking care of American patients” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, said Cambridge, Mass., researcher Linda Barnes. But what sets Hay apart are the documents remaining that describe the things he did, she said.

Barnes is an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. She wrote “Needles, Herbs, Gods and Ghosts: Chinese Healing and the West Until 1848,” and visited the museum last month.

“It is almost as if he just left,” she said. “We can see what herbs he was using. We can see his prescriptions. We can see the letters from his patients.”

Erected between 1860 and 1870, the Kam Wah Chung building was constructed of a local stone called “rattlesnake tuft” and encompasses Hay’s modest living quarters and a general store, medical office and pharmacy.

Hay was born in 1862 in Hsia Pin Li, a village in southern China. He was about 19 when he immigrated to the “Gum Sam” or “Golden Mountain,” as frontier-era Chinese called the Western United States. Initially, he worked in the gold mines, according to a 1979 biography, “China Doctor of John Day,” by Jeffrey Barlow and Christine Richardson.

At that time, Chinese immigrants made up about 25 percent of Oregon’s population. Records in the 1870s suggest 3,330 Chinese lived along the John Day, Powder and Rogue rivers alone. Around John Day and Canyon City, most labored in the mines, where an estimated $26 million in gold was panned from the streams or gouged out of the mountains between 1862 and 1885. An 1879 census recorded 960 whites and 2,468 Chinese miners in the John Day-Canyon City area, although Sweet says the actual count of Chinese probably was closer to 4,000.

Chinese laborers were forbidden to bring wives to America or to marry white women. As a consequence of such federal immigration laws as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, they became a bachelor society. Only three Chinese women are believed to have lived in the John Day area in the gold rush years, Sweet said.

Life was hard and dangerous for the Chinese. Cowboys and miners were wont to drunkenly gallop their horses through Chinatown, shooting wildly, said Judith Bracken, a museum guide, and the door of the museum sports a large-caliber bullet hole. Such antics prompted Hay to install a second door of louvered steel to prevent lead from penetrating the building after he’d barred the door for the night.

“It was the wild, wild West,” Bracken said. “They were riding fast, and they weren’t really aiming, and they thought they were having fun.”

By 1920, the mining boom ended and the Chinese all but disappeared. Some departed for jobs on farms, ranches and the Columbia River fish canneries, or returned to China, Sweet said. A few became cowboys. Doc Hay and his business partner Lung On remained in John Day.

By then, Hay’s reputation for his medical skills was such “that people were coming to him from Utah and Nevada and from all over Idaho and Oregon and Washington and northern California,” she said.

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Most of his patients were non-Chinese, and more than half were women, Sweet said. He became famous for his treatments of blood poisoning, meningitis, lumbago, stomach ailments, hemorrhage, influenza, gynecological problems and the common cold, Sweet said.

On one occasion, Hay was briefly charged with practicing medicine without a license, Sweet said. The white community’s respect for his abilities was so great that no judge would preside over a trial and nobody would sit on the jury. The charges were dropped.

Some John Day-area residents still recall being treated by Hay when they were children, Sweet said. They describe “going in there, and it being kind of dark, and being scared. But we have wonderful stories of him being able to cure stuff nobody else could.”

Occasionally, he would suggest a patient visit a Western doctor. “”He’s not going to do anything for you, but come back when you’ve tried him,”‘ he would say.

Hay practiced “pulse diagnosis,” an ancient technique of feeling a patient’s pulse for irregularities. Sometimes he looked at a tongue or smelled someone’s breath. Without asking, Hay then would tell them where their pain was centered, diagnose the problem and prescribe a remedy consisting of as many as 52 herbs.

After his death, the Kam Wah Chung building was padlocked and forgotten for nearly 20 years. When it was reopened in the 1970s, officials found 20,000 pages of his papers, including 1,500 detailed accounts of herbal remedies he administered between 1900 and 1920, Sweet said.

“The problem we have, everything is written in Chinese,” and perhaps only one-fiftieth of the papers have been translated, Sweet said.

Hay never became fluent at speaking English, and John Day’s remoteness has hampered efforts to translate documents from the Chinese, she said. Tim Lucas, a graduate student at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, helped translate some of Hay’s papers in the early 1990s.

The Department of Parks and Recreation is seeking grants to get Hay’s documents digitized and scanned into a computer so they can be sent elsewhere and translated.

Curiously, when the Kam Wah Chung house was reopened, local officials discovered uncashed checks totaling $23,000, written by his patients between 1902 and 1929. Hay may have known those patients were struggling financially and didn’t have the heart to cash their checks.

Officials also discovered 96 bottles of unopened pre-Prohibition-era whiskey between ceiling rafters and under the floor.

The building is a time capsule revealing much about the Chinese medical arts of the era and about the life of the Chinese in the region, Sweet said. Letters, journals, business records and containers of 500 separate herbs, only 200 of which have been identified, also were found.

When Hay himself needed medical treatment, however, no other “China doctor” was around to care for him. He was hospitalized in Portland after breaking his hip in a fall and then spent four years in a nursing home. Barlow and Richardson say he contracted pneumonia and died after being left untended on a cold metal table while receiving X-rays. At his own request, he was buried in John Day.

RB END COCKLE

(Richard Cockle is a correspondent for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at rcockle(at)oregonwireless.net.)

2008-06-20-CHINA-DOC-CURES

AP-NY-06-20-08 1706EDT