AUTEURE

Norman Bethune

Honoré comme un héros en Chine, Norman Bethune, né en Ontario, était un chirurgien, un innovateur médical et un activiste politique charismatique qui a fait montre de ses talents sur les champs de bataille de l'Espagne et de la Chine dans les années '30. Sa prodigieuse énergie l'a amené à inventer des instruments chirurgicaux et des unités mobiles de transfusion sanguine, à enseigner, et à promouvoir la justice sociale autant au Canada qu'à l'étranger. Adrienne Clarkson, une Canadienne d'ascendance chinoise, a toujours été fascinée par cet homme dynamique qui a joint sa conscience sociale et sa mission médicale. Condamné comme communiste par certains, vénéré en tant qu'humaniste par d'autres, Bethune était un personnage complexe, inspirant et provocateur qui a vécu et aimé sur une vaste échelle.

Au sujet de l'artiste

Carl Joseph Shinkaruk est reconnu et admiré à l'étranger pour son oeuvre puissante et sensible qui est profondément enracinée dans son enfance vécus dans les Prairies canadiennes. Très tôt dans sa carrière, il a connu une notoriété internationale grâce à des expositions à la prestigieuse Metropolitan Gallery d'Hawaii et au Japon. C'est là que son travail a été présenté au côté de celui d'artistes tels que comme Norman Rockwell et Salvador Dali. Le réalisme magique de Carl Joseph Shinkaruk continue d'attirer l'attention de collectionneurs partout dans le monde et l'utilisation commerciale de ses images est un grand succès.

Bethune:
Consummate humanitarian and man of action

Author, journalist and former governor general Adrienne Clarkson brings a fresh perspective to this compelling and accessible introduction to Dr. Norman Bethune (1890-1939), who is arguably the world's most famous surgeon, known for his humanitarian internationalism by hundreds of millions in China.

Bethune's fascinating story is well told in this slender volume. Clarkson shows us Bethune as a young man, moving from the logging camps of Northern Ontario to his training in Toronto and his practise in Detroit, Michigan, and Montréal, Quebec. She describes the frustrating intensity that led him to marry and divorce the same woman twice, and his never smooth interactions with his colleagues. Many of his contradictions are on display: the Montréal socialist willingly courting the Montréal socialites, promoting free medical care while touting his own line of surgical instruments. All this contributes to our understanding of the man, the doctor and the Canadian. Clarkson also makes innumerable connections that secure Bethune's ideas within Canada's social fabric. Bethune was a man of action, so when he wrote “Let us redefine medical ethics, not as a code of professional etiquette between doctors but as a code of fundamental morality and justice between medicine and the peopleâ€� he also promptly set about to reform health care in Montréal as a publicly funded good. His proposals were met by what Clarkson characterizes as "resounding indifference from the medical profession, the political class, and the public; anything that smacked of publicly funded health care carried with it the subtext of Russian Communism and was not looked upon kindly."

Clarkson does us the favour of examining Bethune's life and ideas from today's perspective, so that we know him as a man who was decades ahead of his time, a man who anticipated the necessary changes in health care that occurred well after his lifetime. Bethune had little of the patience required to see his ethical insights into how medicine should work actually put into practice. Rather, he had to act, and act quickly, quickly enough that even other surgeons soon tired of working with him. Only the international stage was big enough for Bethune.

Blood-banking is one example of his big-picture medical innovation. North America's first blood bank was established at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, one year after Bethune pioneered blood banking as a supplement to the then-common direct transfusion technique. Bethune's advances were made in a mobile transfusion unit that he founded to support the Spanish resistance to fascism. He had little training or experience in transfusion medicine and was regularly coping with bombing raids and humanitarian needs during his time in the Spanish Civil War (1936-7). This turmoil created sufficient motivation and challenge to keep him on this task that ultimately saved hundreds of lives.

Bethune is best known, however, for his internationalism and humanitarianism, particularly for his voluntary service, from 1938 to his death in 1939, in Mao Zedong's Eighth Route Army in their struggle during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In addition to performing battlefield surgical operations, he established training for physicians, nurses and others. Mao upheld his humanitarian and social ideals, and wrote of them in his essay In Memory of Norman Bethune, as an example for all of China. And indeed, he became known to hundreds of millions in that country.

Yet Bethune's communist connections have long kept him from recognition among the pantheon of influential Canadians, so it's gratifying to see him included in this new series of biographies from Penguin. The series weaves together the ideas that matter in Canada today, highlighting the extraordinary lives that have moulded our country.

Bethune changed the world with his idea that medical and surgical care must be accessible to those most in need. Canada has done well for itself by putting these ideas into practice within our borders, but we have far to go in putting these ideas into practice across the globe. Perhaps Canada will play a leading role in global health and international surgery worthy of Bethune's legacy. Clarkson shows us clearly who he was, why he mattered, how he contributed to our Canada of today and why his ideas still matter as we mutually invent our future.

Andrew William Howard MD
Director
Office of International Surgery
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ont.


Dr. Howard hosts an annual international surgical meeting named in Norman Bethune's honour. While attendees are not Bethune scholars, they are interested in surgery for human development and believe that Bethune's ideals about humanitarianism and internationalism strike a chord with many doctors.

After years of legal wrangling over his reputation, Norman Bethune is beginning to come into focus

Since Norman Bethune's heroic death at 49 in the mountains of China, during the Japanese invasion, the struggle over his legacy has become almost as dramatic as his life had been.

In 1952, Montréal writers and Communist Party faithfuls Ted Allan and Sidney Gordon published the first biography of the maverick Canadian surgeon, The Scalpel, the Sword. Though it moved many readers, the book was an unreliable hagiography stuffed with invented dialogue and lacking footnotes, an index or any other scholarly apparatus. More than half the book was set in China, where the two authors had not set foot. They drew liberally on a 1948 Chinese novel by Zhou Erfu, Doctor Norman Bethune , which they forgot to acknowledge.

Thereafter, Allan, who had a brief friendship with Bethune in Montréal and Spain, laid claim to the letters and other materials the Communist Party of Canada had provided to him for research purposes, and restricted their use. In any case, there was scant interest until after 1971, when Canada established diplomatic relations with "Red" China, where the doctor's burial place is a national shrine.

Allan used Bethune's legacy for personal gain, going so far as to threaten to sue Roderick Stewart when the latter wrote Bethune, a less tendentious biography, in 1973. Allan's epic battles with actor Donald Sutherland about matters of interpretation on the set of the 1990 biopic Bethune: The Making of a Hero helped to turn that film into a disaster.

Historian Larry Hannant has called Allan's claim of owning Bethune's copyrights "legally dubious and morally baseless." Nevertheless, Hannant was forced to sign a deal just weeks before Allan's death to hand over half the net proceeds of his (Hannant's) book The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art, which the University of Toronto Press issued in 1998.

" ...Perhaps the most inspired pairing of author and subject in Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canadians series to date"

In the 14 years since Allan died, Bethune is beginning to come into clearer focus. Adrienne Clarkson arrives at the right moment with her compact biography Norman Bethune to sum him up for a new generation of readers. Her strength is her knowledge of Canadian social, cultural and political history, into which she inserts Bethune. The Chinese have claimed him as their own, though he spent only 20 months in their country. Clarkson reclaims him, showing how thoroughly a Canadian product this original médecin sans frontières was.

His ethic of service to others was shaped by his experiences as the son of a Presbyterian minister, growing up in small towns atop the Canadian Shield. To earn his university fees, he worked in northern lumber camps teaching rough immigrant men to read for Frontier College. Here, in the years before the First World War, he developed a particularly Canadian sort of fortitude and self-reliance (and likely was infected with tuberculosis, which did not show itself until years later).

He was attuned to both of Canada's founding cultures, leaving his prestigious position at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal to head the surgical team at Sacré-Coeur, a French-speaking hospital run by nuns, where he was greatly appreciated.

Neither did he miss out on the Great War, the nation's formative experience. He was a stretcher-bearer at the second Battle of Ypres, nearly losing his leg to a shrapnel wound.

Clarkson points out that Bethune's childhood coincided with a time of evangelical fervour. His father, Rev. Malcolm Bethune, was a follower of Dwight Moody, who preached the goal of evangelizing the whole world in one generation. No country offered more souls to save than China. At the end of the 19th century, 25 missionary societies in Toronto were sending missionaries there.

Near the end of his life, Bethune exploded with fury when Jean Ewen, a feisty Chinese-speaking Toronto nurse who assisted him in China, called him a missionary. Yet Ewen (left entirely out of The Scalpel, the Sword) was close to the mark.

Clarkson offers no explanation of Bethune's complete estrangement from his family, nor does she shed much new light on his stormy marriage, divorce, remarriage and second divorce from his Scottish wife Frances, a shallow gold digger. "They did not have any children and reading some of Bethune's letters to her, you wonder if they ever really had sex," she writes.

She is insightful in her description of Bethune's struggle in his late 30s with tuberculosis and his stay at the Trudeau sanatorium on Saranac Lake, N.Y., which ended when he insisted on trying a risky new therapy, the artificial collapse of his diseased lung. The procedure resulted in his complete recovery and led to his decision to become a thoracic surgeon in order to defeat the scourge of TB. In the 1920s, 48,000 Canadians came down with it every year, and many who could not afford good medical care died.

"He fought the disease on two fronts - as a doctor and as a social activist," Clarkson writes. As a doctor, he invented new surgical tools, of which the Bethune rib shearers are still in use. As a social activist, he argued for free health care.

But he was also a painter, founder of a children's art school and a published poet and short-story writer, who was most at home among Montréal's unconventional artistic community. "I am an artist," he wrote. "I work through intuition."

His friends included painters such as Fritz Brandtner, John Lyman, Edwin Holgate, Anne Savage and Marian Dale Scott, with whom he fell deeply in love. "She was the unique love of his life," writes Clarkson, the first biographer to make use of their highly charged correspondence.

"You are my sister - we think alike, act alike and feel alike," Bethune wrote to the woman he called Pony. "I want you as a man wants a woman." Both knew that it was a dangerous affair (she was married) and backed off from it at the last minute, a renunciation that Clarkson terms "elegant."

Surprisingly, though, she omits any mention of his subsequent affair with Toronto painter Paraskeva Clark, who was just as married. Bethune encouraged Clark to use the subject matter of her Russian childhood in her art, and when he returned from Spain to fundraise in Toronto and across Canada, he brought her the objects that went into her greatest still life, Presents from Madrid: a red scarf, a Spanish magazine, a sheet of music, a soldier's hat from the International Brigade.

"He was my boyfriend," Clark told me when I interviewed her in 1983.

By 1935, when he joined the Communist Party of Canada, Bethune was alarmed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Frustrated that Canada, the United States and Britain insisted on maintaining neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, while Nazi Germany and Mussolini in Italy supplied troops and warplanes to Franco's forces, he spent seven hectic months aiding the Republican cause by organizing the first mobile blood-transfusion service along the front. His creation of a blood bank (at the time, transfusions were generally person-to-person) predated by a full year the creation of the first blood bank in North America, in Chicago.

Bethune's speaking tour for the Spanish cause in 1937 ended in Vancouver, where he embarked for China on the Empress of Asia.

Clarkson summarizes the hardships he faced in China, and the superhuman effort he made to treat the thousands wounded by Japanese bombing, while lacking adequate supplies of soap, gloves, bed sheets, medicines, buckets, basins, splints, prosthetic legs - almost everything needful. When he was not operating, he was training teenage peasants to be nurses and assistant doctors.

Clarkson knows China and in Yan'an visited the spare, whitewashed room where the sole meeting between Bethune and Mao Zedong took place in April, 1938. According to Jean Ewen's memoirs, the two looked at each other for a moment, then embraced as brothers, before talking all through the night.

Here the reader has to remind herself this took place before Mao turned into one of the greatest mass murderers in history.

Clarkson's Norman Bethune is perhaps the most inspired pairing of author and subject in Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canadians series to date.

Judy Stoffman is a Toronto writer, critic and literary journalist.