Letter

One February morning in 1961, the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung was very pleased to read an article carried in the then Minju Chongnyon newspaper.

The article titled “Sincerity Devoted to Save a Life” dealt with a moving story. According to the article, students at Hamhung College of Medical Sciences who were undergoing internship at the then Hungnam Fertilizer Factory Hospital and scores of other people donated their skin and thereby helped save a boy in a critical condition with serious burns.

Kim Il Sung said to officials: Now our people are doing things the like of which can never be found elsewhere in the world. The world has never seen people donating their flesh to others. Such a beautiful deed can be witnessed only in our country’s socialist system. 

That day he sent letters to Hamhung College of Medical Sciences and the Hungnam Fertilizer Factory Hospital, in which he wrote: I have read a moving newspaper article about the students helping save a boy in a critical condition with serious burns by donating their flesh for grafting surgery on him. This demonstrates the ennobling communist traits of new people in our era who have been trained by the Party and the spirit of ardently loving the people and devotedly serving them which is being fostered among our youth and students.