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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63153 Medium Norman Bethune: chest surgeon, activist and wartime doctor

Read the following passage.

A. Norman Bethune was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario, in 1890. Wounded at Ypres as a stretcher bearer in the First World War, he went home to finish his medical degree. In the mid-1920s he caught tuberculosis, but a risky operation on his diseased lung cured him within a month. Early in 1928 he moved to Montreal, where he spent five years as first surgical assistant to Dr. Edward Archibald at the Royal Victoria Hospital. He designed many new instruments, and one, the Bethune Rib Shears, is still manufactured. In 1933, after frictions with some other doctors, he left to head chest surgery at the smaller Sacré Coeur Hospital.

B. The Great Depression turned the surgeon into an activist. About a third of the people of Montreal were on direct relief, and Bethune came to believe that medicine must deal with the social causes of disease as well as its symptoms. In 1935 he opened a free clinic for the unemployed. He became sure that only government regulation of private practice would ensure treatment for all, whatever their income, and in 1936 he founded an advocacy group for public health care, the Montreal Group for the Security of the People's Health. That same year he joined the Communist Party.

C. In September 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Bethune volunteered to go to Spain for a Canadian aid committee. Shortly after arriving in Madrid, he planned a mobile service that would collect blood from donors in the cities and carry it wherever it was most needed, and within a month the unit was working. He later called it a 'glorified milk delivery service', but it has been described as the greatest innovation in military medicine of that war. By May 1937 the army's medical services had become a bureaucracy in which he felt he could not function, and he went home to tour Canada raising money for Spain.

D. On January 8, 1938, Bethune left Canada for the last time and went to China, where he worked with the Eighth Route Army of Mao Zedong's Communists against the Japanese forces. As one of the few qualified doctors in a huge region, he put much of his energy into teaching. A model hospital he planned opened in September 1938 but was destroyed by enemy action within three weeks, so he turned to mobile care. In late October 1939 he cut his finger while operating, and he died of blood poisoning on November 12. Mao's essay 'In Memory of Norman Bethune' is still required reading in China.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
He first met the senior surgeon he later assisted in Montreal while he was still a patient himself.

- 2.
One of the tools he invented for operations is still being made.

- 3.
Other physicians in the city paid for the free care he offered to jobless people.

- 4.
A hospital he created in China was wiped out in under a month.

- 5.
An accident during an operation led to the infection that killed him.

- 6.
Local doctors found him hard to work with because he had not learned their language.

- 7.
After disagreements with colleagues, he moved to a smaller hospital.

- 8.
He became convinced that doctors should address the social roots of illness, not only its signs.

- 9.
In Spain he set up a way to bring donated blood to the places that needed it most.

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