Ye Xin passed away wearing a white nurse's robe.

"She would be happy if she knew she went away dressed in her favourite suit," said grief-stricken husband Zhang Shen.

Ye, the 47-year-old head nurse of the Emergency Treatment Department with the Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, died on March 25 after contracting SARS when treating patients with the virus.

Ye's death was a huge loss to her family and to staff at the hospital who remember her as a dedicated and selfless "angel in white."

That dedication and selflessness were clear for all to see each time a crisis arose at the hospital, where SARS patients were being treated. Ye would tell her younger colleagues: "This is dangerous, let me do it."

In early February, the hospital saw a sudden influx of patients with a flu-like illness - later to become known as SARS.

With the sudden increase in workload, Ye was the first on the emergency ward to volunteer to work overtime. Engrossed in her work, Ye sometimes refused to answer phone calls from home, recalled her colleagues.

"She knew the danger of the virus," recalled husband Zhang Shen. "She cancelled all family gatherings with our parents the weekend after she began to fight SARS at the frontline."

As head nurse, Ye never hesitated to undertake all risky tasks - most of which brought her into contact with patients' excrement.

She told junior nurses: "You are still young, this is too dangerous for you."

She also prepared vitamin pills for her co-workers every morning and repeatedly reminded them to take precautionary measures in their battle against the disease.

Ye found herself in pain all over her body with a slight fever on March 4 and was immediately put under observation and treated in the ward where she had worked for the past 27 years. She was later confirmed as having contracted SARS.

No one could figure out exactly how and when she became infected because she had joined in so many emergency rescue treatments.

"She may have become infected on March 1, because all four doctors and nurses who treated an elderly SARS patient were later found to have a fever," recalled Zhang Zhongde, director of the Emergency Treatment Department.

Zhang was later confirmed as having SARS but has since recovered.

When doctors and nurses visited Ye in the isolation ward, she never failed to remind them to put on extra layers of protective suit.

As her condition worsened, she was transferred to the intensive care unit where her breathing was aided by machine. Unable to speak because of the machine, Ye wrote her wishes on paper and passed it to all the people who came to see and treat her. It said: "Don't come near me. I am infected."

In the early hours of March 25, Ye Xin died, giving her life after saving the lives of scores of other patients.

A website mourning Ye was quickly set up and more than 160,000 people visited within a few days to pay their respects.

Together with nine other Chinese nurses, Ye was awarded the Florence Nightingale Prize, the highest honor for nurses, by the International Committee of the Red Cross on May 12 for her outstanding courage and dedication to work.

On the same day, a statue of Ye Xin made from white marble was placed in the hall of the Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine to commemorate her selfless work.

No new SARS cases have been reported for eight successive days since May 18 in Guangdong Province, where the country's first SARS case was recorded. By yesterday, 1,513 SARS cases were recorded in the province and 1,432 people had been discharged from hospitals.

(China Daily May 26, 2003)