By pure chance, in May 2016, an American pathologist, Rolf F. Barth, was visiting the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou when he noticed a faded copy of the original autopsy report on display. The autopsy was performed immediately after Sun's death by James Cash, a pathologist at PUMCH. Based on a tissue sample, Cash concluded that the cause of death was an adenocarcinoma in the gallbladder that had metastasized to the liver. In modern China, liver cancer is far more common than gallbladder cancer. Although the incidence rates for either one in 1925 are not known, if one assumes that they were similar at the time, the original diagnosis by Taylor was a reasonable conclusion. From the time of Sun's death to the appearance of Barth's report in the Chinese Journal of Cancer in September 2016, Sun's true cause of death was not reported in any English-language publication. Even in Chinese-language sources, it appeared in only one non-medical online report in 2013.
By pure chance, in May 2016, an American pathologist, Rolf F Barth, was visiting the ,Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou when he noticed a faded copy of the original autopsy report on display. The autopsy was performed immediately after Sun's death by James Cash, a pathologist at PUMCH. Based on a tissue sample, Cash concluded that the cause of death was an adenocarcinoma in the gallbladder that had metastasized to the liver. In modern China liver cancer is far more common than gallbladder cancer. Although the incidence rates for either one in 1925 are not known, if one assumes that they were similar at the .time the original diagnosis by Taylor was a reasonable conclusion. From the time of Sun's death to the appearance of Barth's report in the Chinese Journal of Cancer in September 2016, Sun's true cause of death was not reported in any English-language publication. Even in Chinese-language sources, it appeared in only one, non-medical online report in 2013.