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Published at www.cmaj.ca on Nov.18
In the winter of 1938, Dr. Henry Norman Bethune left Canada and arrived in China's Shanxi province during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Virtually unknown in his home country, he worked with Mao Zedong's Communist Party performing emergency battlefield surgeries, set up blood transfusion stations and created a training program for doctors, nurses and orderlies.
Most knew Bethune by his Chinese name, Bai Qiu En, a man who became a national hero after dying in 1939 of blood poisoning. Mao Zedong was so inspired by Bethune's acts that he wrote an essay, "In Memory of Norman Bethune," that, years later, children still memorize and recite. A medical school and a hospital were nammed in Bethune's memory.
Thousands of Canadian medical professionals and researchers have followed in Bethune's footsteps, travelling to China to work on a variety of research projects and exchanges.
It's a practice that is booming, and almost weekly, it seems, there are announcements from Canadian governments or universities about new collaborative projects with China.
"There is tremendous opportunity for research between Canada and China," says Dr. Massey Beveridge, who founded the Office of International Surgery at the University of Toronto in Ontario and now practises in northern Newfoundland.
Beveridge first ventured to China in 1987, as a 26-year-old medical student from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, to become part of a group of 50 foreign students from more than 25 different countries doing medical work at Rui Jin Hospital in Shanghai. "They were tremendously welcoming to a little junior Canadian medical student," he says. "It was a great learning experience."
So great, in fact, that Beveridge returned 17 years later to help set up a collaborative program between the Rui Jin Hospital Burn Unit and the Ross Tilley Burn Centre in Toronto.
As China continues to evolve into one of the world's major scientific players, such projects will only continue to multiply,...