For much of the 20th century, residents of the southwestern Taiwan coastal plain — in areas around Tainan and Chiayi — drew their drinking water from artesian wells. The wells were deep, reliable, and heavily contaminated with arsenic. This was not widely understood at first. The communities that depended on the wells were rural and poor, and the connection between the water and the disease that began appearing among them took years to establish.

Blackfoot disease — known in Chinese as wūjiǎobìng, 烏腳病 — is a peripheral vascular disease caused by chronic arsenic poisoning. Blood flow to the extremities diminishes. The skin discolors, the tissue dies. The disease progresses from numbness and cold feet to unbearable pain and, in the worst cases, the blackening of the flesh that gave the condition its name. Among patients who developed full blackfoot disease, the majority required amputation — often of the feet or lower legs. The reamputation rate was significant. People who survived the disease often survived it incomplete.

Dr. Wang Jin-he set up his clinic in Beimen's Yonglong Village and committed himself to serving the patients blackfoot disease brought to his door. For 25 years, he provided free medical services to people from Beimen and the surrounding regions — communities where the cost of medical care was itself a burden beyond many families' reach.

The clinic was not just a treatment center. Dr. Wang and those who worked alongside him understood that what was happening here was a public health catastrophe with a social dimension: these were poor fishing and salt-farming households, people whose labor was essential to the coastal economy and who had been poisoned by the infrastructure they depended on. Caring for them was an act of medicine and of justice simultaneously. The government initiated a tap-water supply system in blackfoot-endemic areas in 1960, and by 1970 most southwestern Taiwan residents had stopped drinking from the artesian wells. But the damage done to those who had already been exposed lasted for the rest of their lives.

After Dr. Wang's decades of service, the clinic where he worked fell into disuse. The question of what to do with it became a civic and cultural question. Tainan County Magistrate Su Huan-chih and Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Ye Tzer-shan proposed converting the building into a memorial, arguing that the history of blackfoot disease — and the response of the people who fought it — deserved a permanent home.

Construction on the memorial house began in November 2006 and was completed in September 2007. President Chen Shui-bian formally opened it in late September 2007. After the inauguration, the Wang Jin-he Culture and Arts Foundation assumed stewardship of the site. The memorial preserves records, artifacts, and the physical space of the clinic itself — the building where patients arrived in pain and where a doctor made the decision, repeatedly, over 25 years, to stay and help.

Standing in a quiet village in Beimen District, the memorial house is not a grand monument. It is a modest building, and that modesty is part of what it means. The people who suffered from blackfoot disease were not famous. Most of them are not named in any official record. They were farmers, salt workers, fisherfolk — people whose lives ran close to the land and the water, who lost the use of their limbs to a slow poison they could not have known was there.

The memorial honors them alongside the physicians who served them. It does not treat the disease as a curiosity of medical history or as an abstraction. The people who came to Dr. Wang's clinic were individuals — they had families, they had work they could no longer do, they had pain that was real and particular. A memorial that understood only the science would miss the point. This one tries not to. The building still holds the shape of a place where care was given freely, to those who needed it most.