With Devotion and Sincerity

Rim Hyon Dan, department chief of the General Red Cross Hospital of the DPRK, is an authority on cosmetic surgery.

It was in 2014 when her name was known to the whole country.

At that time she was given wide publicity by newspapers and radios because she cured a girl from a mountainous county, who had terrible burns on her eyelids, lips, nose, cheeks and jaws, through her devoted efforts of eight years.

When she first saw the girl (Rim Song Mi by name, 19 of age) who came to the hospital in 2006, the girl’s condition was so serious that she concluded it was virtually impossible to cure the patient.

But she decided to defy the impossibility as she felt very sorry that otherwise the girl would have to live on avoiding looking at herself in the mirror.

She regarded the girl as her daughter and devoted herself to treating the patient.

While understanding the patient’s condition in detail, she explored a superior surgical method.

Thanks to her sincere efforts, plastic surgery with soft tissue expansion was developed and introduced into more than 100 large and small operations.

She performed each round of surgery with a kindred feeling, not merely with a sense of responsibility as a physician, and after the operation she prepared by herself nutritive foods for her patient.

Over the period, the patient regained the joy of life together with her beautiful face, and after discharge she became a mother of two children.

Rim Hyon Dan has treated not only the girl but also a large number of patients for nearly 40 years. In the course of this, she became a winner of the February 16 Science and Technology Prize, Merited Doctor, PhD and Associate Professor.