This side path is organized around the life and work of one of the most famous Vietnamese medical doctors, Tôn Thất Tùng. Although Tùng trained as a liver surgeon and is best known for developing a liver surgery technique, his role in the medical corps and ministry of health of the Việt Minh meant that he played an important role in investigating suspected use of germ warfare during the First Indochina War. In fact, he spent much of the 1950s through the 1980s researching the effects of various forms of environmental warfare and fighting its use.

In the late 1940s, the Việt Minh were engaged in a fierce battle for survival with the French. Starting in late 1946, when Tùng left the Yersin hospital to join the resistance, he and other medical doctors operated a mobile hospital and medical school in Chiêm Hóa in northern Vietnam. Tùng worked effectively and in 1948 he became vice minister of health. As Christopher Goscha has recently shown, wartime conditions and state-building needs gave Vietnamese medical doctors no choice but to focus on military medicine. The difficult early years of the First Indochina War forced the Việt Minh medical personnel to find innovative solutions, including the use of a bicycle to generate electricity. [Goscha reference].

How representative was Tùng's decision to go to the resistance zone? By most measures, Tùng was exceptional. Notably, not more than one third of medical doctors trained by the French chose to follow Hồ Chí Minh into anti-colonial resistance (Goscha, 2011). This is not to say that many medical doctors were not nationalists but for either personal, familial, or ideological reasons, most chose not to follow the Việt Minh.

[This material comes from article co-authored with Annick Guénel - cite.]