Norman Bethune Hero of China

Norman Bethune (1830-1939) was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario and he had one sister and one brother. In September 1909 he enrolled at the University of Toronto. He interrupted his studies for one year in 1911 to be a volunteer labourer-teacher with Frontier College at remote lumber and mining camps throughout northern Ontario, teaching immigrant mine labourers how to read and write English. In 1914 when war was declared in Europe, he once again suspended his medical studies. He joined the No. 2 Field Ambulance to serve as a stretcher-bearer in France. He was wounded by shrapnel and spent three months recovering in an English hospital. When he had recuperated from his injury he returned to Toronto to complete his medical degree. He received his M.D. in 1916. In 1917, with the war still in progress, Bethune joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon-lieutenant at the Chatham Hospital in England. In 1919, he began an internship specializing in children's diseases at The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormand St. in London. Later he went to Edinburgh, where he earned his surgical qualifications. In 1923 he married Frances and they took a year to do the Grand Tour of Europe. They then moved to Detroit where Bethune took up private practice and also took a part-time job as an instructor at the Detroit Surgical College.


Bethune spent a good deal of time treating the poor and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He left Detroit for Calydor Sanitorium in Gravenhurst, Ontario. Bethune thought he was dying and demanded a divorce and sent Frances back to Scotland but they continued to write (and when Bethune engineered his own cure from medical reading he had conducted, they remarried only to divorce again three years later). His cure gave him a great interest in artificial pnemothorax procedures and he studied thoracic surgery in Montreal with Dr. Archibald. From 1928 to 1936, Bethune worked as a thoracic surgeon in Montreal. He became famous there for his treatment of tuberculosis patients. His is also known for developing several surgical tools some of which are in use today.

Although he cured hundreds of cases successfully, many of his poorer patients became ill again when they returned to crowded, unsanitary homes. Bethune became increasingly disillusioned with surgical treatment and concerned with the socioeconomic aspects of disease. In 1935 Bethune had travelled to Russia and had taken an interest in Communism. As a concerned doctor in Montreal during the economic depression years of the thirties, Bethune frequently sought out the poor and gave them free medical care. He challenged his professional colleagues and agitated, without success, for the government to make radical reforms of medical care and health services in Canada.Bethune realized they could not be cured without proper living conditions and medical care. Bethune became unpopular among other doctors who thought his ideas were too radical.

Bethune left his practice in Canada to head the Canadian Medical Unit in Madrid where the Spanish Civil War was raging from 1936 -1939. He jointed the Mackenzie-Papineau Military Unit which was made up of Canadians. While there he developed the world’s first mobile transfusion unit (first MASH unit). The mobile unit could conduct up to 100 operations on the battlefront. Bethune returned to Canada on June 6, 1937 where he went on a speaking tour to raise money and volunteers for the anti-fascist battle. In 1938 Bethune travelled to China to help with their war against the Japanese. He became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and trained thousands of medics and doctors. He died in 1939 after getting blood poisoning while doing a surgery. Norman Bethune was immortalized in China by an essay by Mao Zedong who extolled him and admonished the Chinese people to follow his example: "We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very helpful to each other. A person's ability may be great or small, but if he/she has this spirit, he/she is already noble-minded and pure, a person of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a person who is of value to the people." Norman Bethune was far more well known in China than in his native Canada. There are many statues to him in China but his greatest legacy was in opening the door of understanding between Canada and China.