Page 82 - DENG103_English - I

Unit 7: Comprehension of Seen and Unseen Passage

(g) Concern : Drug abuse concerns us all. Notes

Chain : The convict was chained.
(h) (i) conservation (ii) resistant.

PASSAGE 3
Making Surgery Safe
The discovery was germs, microbes, the minute organisms which could only be seen through
the most powerful microscopes, but which bred a life of their own able to destroy the living
tissues infected by them.
It was in surgery that the most spectacular results of that discovery were obtained, and it was
there that the battle between the new idea and the old prejudices was fought out most dramatically.
Its coming into that field changed the whole conditions under which operations were performed
and so enormously extended its possibilities that we reckon the art in two eras : one covering the
history of mankind from the earliest times to this time of Lister ; the other, the period since.
For in ancient India, in Egypt, Greece and Rome, surgery was practised, and the instruments
and knowledge were already remarkable. If it stagnated under Medieval influences, it revived
again under such men as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and moved steadily forward
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as human anatomy and physiology gave their
secrets to the scientists.
In every hospital, whether from some original injury or from the surgeon’s knife, wounds
became inflamed, turned gangrenous, or developed some similar terrible degeneration, and in a
few days the patient died as the whole blood stream became poisoned. Terrible epidemics of
this ‘Hospitalism’, as they called it, would sweep through the wards. Often the authorities
would deliberately close a hospital for a time to try to stamp out the plague. But always it
returned. Even the simplest operation—the removal of a single joint of a finger, the lancing of
an abscess—would prove fatal ; and no operation was possible on the delicate parts of the
human body, for almost inevitable they became infected, and however skilful the surgeon had
been the patient died.
Based on your reading of the above passage, answer the following questions.

(a) What was the discovery which influenced surgery ? In what manner did it do so ?
(b) What was the greatest difficulty in the field of surgery before this discovery ?
(c) Why did the authorities close the hospitals for some time ?
(d) Why did they call this disease ‘Hospitalism’ ?

(e) Frame two questions on the basis of the underlined part of the passage.
(f) Find the best option which completes the given statement :
(A) ‘Hospitalism’ was the name given to a disease which ...
(i) the doctors at the hospital alone could treat.
(ii) the doctors of the hospital knew well.
(iii) made the wounds inflamed causing the death of the patient.
(iv) the ancient surgeons knew well.
(B) Microbes caused the greatest difficulty to ...
(i) common man.
(ii) physicians.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 75