He initially graduated from the German School of Medicine in Shanghai, the predecessor of today's Tongji University.
In September 1944, at the age of 31, Qiu was advanced to the rank of attending physician and headed the Jodquellenhof in Bad Tölz, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital.
One day, a student nurse called Loni König, from Munich, led him to a group of about 40 prisoners, guarded by the SS on the street in front of the hospital.
There, Qiu worked as the head of the surgical department at the Sino-US Hospital that was attached to Tongji University.
Qiu was one of the most acclaimed surgeons of China and a pioneer of Chinese organ transplantation, who wrote a standard textbook of surgery that is still in use and has been reprinted many times.