Bethune, Norman

Bethune, (Henry) Norman

(born March 3, 1890, Gravenhurst, Ont., Can.—died Nov. 12, 1939, Huang Shikou, Hebei, China) Canadian surgeon and political activist. He began his medical career in 1917, serving with Canadian forces in World War I. During the Spanish Civil War he was a surgeon with the loyalist forces, setting up the first mobile blood-transfusion service. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1935, he joined the Communist Party of Canada. In 1938 he left Canada to serve as a surgeon with the Chinese army in its war with Japan, organizing field hospitals and setting up medical schools. He became a national hero of China.

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Bethune, Norman 

Born Mar. 4, 1890; died Nov. 13, 1939. A Canadian surgeon, public figure, antifascist.

Bethune received his medical education at the University of Toronto and worked as a surgeon in London, Toronto, Montreal, and other cities. He wrote a number of articles and made many improvements in the surgical treatment of tuberculosis. Bethune visited the USSR (1935) and lectured in Canada on the USSR. In Spain (1936) he created mobile surgical detachments and organized a blood transfusion service in the republican army. In 1937 he organized a blood service in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. He was active in training medical personnel and educating donors from the local population. Bethune died of a blood infection after operating on wounded soldiers in the mountainous regions of China.

WORKS

“A New Combined Aspirator and Artificial Pneumothorax Apparatus.” Canadian Medical Association Journal, June 1929, vol. 20, p. 663.
“Pleural Poudrage.” Journal of Thoracic Surgery, February 1935, vol. 4, pp. 251–61.

REFERENCES

Allan, T., and S. Gordon. The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune. Boston, 1952. (Partly translated into Russian in Inostrannaia literatura, 1956, nos. 1–2.)

I. V. VENGROVA