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Former Norwegian minister tells story of family connection with China

ABOUT a century ago, Dagfinn Høybråten's great grandfather left Norway to central China’s Hunan Province and became one of the first doctors who brought western medicine to the region.
 
Generations passed, Høybråten brought Chinese traditional medicine to Norway when promoting medical cooperation between China and Norway.
 
Høybråten, Norwegian politician and the country’s former Minister of Health, launched his latest book called "Northern Lights at Peach Flower Hill--a Norwegian Family in Love with China" in Fudan University on Friday. 
 
With the family member’s diary, memoirs, and documented materials from archives in Fudan University and Norway, Høybråten presented the history of the family's connection with China and their devotion to public health through the book.
 
It tells how his great grandfather, Jørgen Edvin Nilssen, built the first hospital and several schools in Hunan’s Yiyang City back then, how Nilssen worked with Yan Fuqing, founder of Shanghai Medical College, in local Red Cross Society, and how himself found and reconnected the family’s link with China when serving as Norway’s Minister of Health.
 
Høybråten considered what his great grandfather and Yan did a century ago is like sowing a seed or planting a tree. Though they cannot harvest the fruit themselves, their work benefited people generations after, he said at the book launch.
 
During Høybråten’s service as Minister of Health from 1997, he promoted exchange and cooperation between medical institutions in Norway and China, and encouraged to integrate complementary and alternative medicine with western medicine in Norway.
 
Høybråten, 60, also served as vice president of the Norwegian Parliament and board chair of Gavi – the Vaccine Alliance before.




 

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