Norman Bethune, 1928, Montreal - "In 1928, Bethune arrived in Montreal, an ambitious young doctor." Credit: Library and Archives Canada

“I do not pity the wounded,

I become the wounded.”

Walt Whitman

Dr. Norman Bethune arrived in Montreal in April 1928 to receive training at the Royal Victoria Hospital under Dr. Edward Archibald, a pioneer at that time in chest (now thoracic) surgery.  Dr. Bethune’s first residence was at the Faculty Club of McGill University. He was thirty-eight years old and recently discharged from the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, where he had been under treatment for a severe case of tuberculosis.  This contagious disease was epidemic without a known cure. Near suicide, Bethune finally learned of pneumothorax, an experimental procedure which Dr. Bethune underwent. His lungs returned to health and his desire to live also.

He no longer wanted to be a general practitioner but a specialist. He wrote to Dr. Edward Archibald who headed a tubercular research center at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.

He immediately hired Dr. Bethune to work for him.

1221 St. Marc Street - "Bethune lived four tumultuous years with his wife Frances at this address (building now a highrise)" Credit: Anne Cimon

Dr. Bethune moved to a more permanent address at 1221 St. Marc Street at the corner of Baile street, now part of what is called the Shaughnessey Village. The building has been torn down and replaced by a plain looking highrise. The other buildings would be the ones that Dr. Bethune laid eyes on as he stepped out to go to work at the hospital after a breakfast of “coffee, toast and marmalade.” A late 1800′s mansion across narrow Baile Street, for example. He enjoyed the twenty minute walk to the Royal Victoria Hospital along Sherbrooke Street West.

The hospital at the top of Mount Royal had been built in 1893 in the style of a Scottish castle. No doubt, it reminded  Bethune  of his ex-wife Frances Penney who had returned to her native Scotland when he fell ill with tuberculosis.The true story of why they first divorced is not known though one version is that Bethune refused to enter the Trudeau Sanatorium unless Frances returned to her family. Now that he had escaped death, Bethune wrote long charming letters to Frances whom he often said he fell in love with “at first sound” due to her Scottish accent. She agreed to come  to Montreal and they were remarried on November 11, 1929. That a young woman from a privileged family would be willing to live in such a modest home

as the apartment on St. Marc  Street testifies to her true love for Bethune, who signed his letters “Beth,” his nickname with friends.

It was the Depression years, and Dr. Bethune tended to the many poor as he had done in Detroit, Michigan, where he had his first practice and where the couple had first lived. It was there that he contracted TB. Dr. Bethune noticed how the poor died in far greater numbers than the rich and his social conscience deepened in Montreal. Immersed in his work, Dr. Bethune’s surgical skills increased and so did his reputation among his peers. Often irritated by the lack of proper instruments, he invented new ones which were advertised and sold  in a prominent American catalogue. The Bethune Rib Shears are still in use today.

He also wrote and published numerous medical articles, and worked as a consultant in hospitals in outlying areas of Montreal such as the Royal Laurentian Sanatorium up north in Ste-Agathe. By then, he had purchased a bright yellow car and cut a dashing figure wearing a French beret and a long scarf around his neck.

Sacré-Coeur Hospital - "In 1933, Dr. Bethune became Chief of Pulmonary Surgery at Sacré-Coeur Hospital north of Montreal." Credit: Alexis Hamel de Images Montréal http://www.imtl.org

Dr. Archibald, a conservative man in his mid-fifties, had grown irritated by the flamboyance of his younger colleague and the irritation was mutual. In January 1933, Dr. Bethune accepted with “delight” the prestigious post of “Chef dans le service de Chirurgie Pulmonaire et de Bronchoscopie” at the newly built Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur run by the Sisters of Providence in Cartierville. This was a French-Canadian Catholic hospital ten miles north of the city and Dr. Bethune could easily drive the distance in his yellow car. The nuns overlooked his bohemian way of dressing (he wore sandals with no socks)  and his loud ebullience since they approved of him as a brilliant surgeon who was devoted to his patients. He would often be seen on the ward late at night to double-check on a patient he was concerned about, before driving home downtown.

1947 Baile Street - "Divorced, Bethune hosted here many soirées for Montreal writers, artists, political activists and medical colleagues." Credit: Anne Cimon

Dr. Bethune moved  to 1947 Baile Street, a few doors down from the flat on St. Marc Street that he had shared with Frances. Disillusioned by his eccentricities, desiring a normal life, Frances had asked for a second divorce in March 1933, so she could marry A.R.E. Coleman, one of Dr. Bethune’s friends. Though he was devastated by the failure of the marriage, he agreed to the divorce, and even attended their wedding.

His new apartment was on the second floor of an attractive greystone building with a peaked roof, which now fronts the Canadian Center for Architecture. He shared it for a time witha colleague, Dr. Aubrey Geddes. The two single men liked to throw parties which were popular with artists, writers, and political activists. Dr. Bethune often purchased original art to decorate his apartment and support the Montreal artists. He befriended Fritz Brantner who did a painting of the doctor as he attended a patient in the operating room at Sacré-Coeur Hospital, surrounded by the nuns. This painting is widely reproduced in books.

Bethune always wanted to care for the poor. After some deliberation, he decided to attend the International Physiological Congress in Leningrad, Soviet Union. He saw first-hand how the Soviet medical system had reduced tuberculosis by fifty percent and how the poor were attended to as their right. Bethune sold his yellow car to fund this two-month trip which proved to be transformational. When he returned to Montreal, he knew that radical change was needed in Canada’s medical system. He gave an electrifying lecture entitled “Take the Private Profit out of Medicine” to the Montreal Medico-Chirurgical Society.

Something more personal ignited Bethune on his way to the Soviet Union. He had met the young Montreal artist Marian Dale Scott on the boat to London, England. She was the wife of F.R. Scott, the well-respected Montreal constitutional lawyer and published poet. They began a correspondence and when Bethune returned to Montreal, Marian Scott visited him on Fort Street where he had relocated.

1255 Fort Street - "Dr. Bethune had a vision for socialized medicine in Quebec and Canada and joined the Communist Party in 1935." Credit: Anne Cimon

The building at 1255 Fort Street is at the corner of Tupper Street. The exterior is plain, reminiscent of a rectangular convent dormitory, with an entrance a few steps below street level. Bethune met Stanley Ryerson, the secretary of the Quebec wing of the Communist Party. In November 1935, Bethune became a member. This had to be kept secret as it was an illegal organization at that time. Bethune knew that his position at the Sacré Coeur Hospital would be compromised if the Catholic nuns learned about this. His own attitude towards being a Communist remained ambiguous. When he did make it public, and confirmed it to the press, he remarked: “They call me a Red. Then if Christianity is a Red, I am also a Red.”

But what was important to Bethune was to eradicate tuberculosis and treat those who had no means. He held a free clinic at the YMCA on Gordon Street in Verdun. He continued to publish medical articles. In his private hours, he read poetry by William Blake and Walt Whitman, and wrote poetry that he shared with Marian Scott.  He also painted a self-portrait that he gave to her as a gift.

Early in the year 1936, Dr. Bethune moved to 1154  Beaver Hall Square near  Dorchester Street (now Boulevard René Lévesque.) The building has been demolished but the area he had chosen was popular with artists who had studios. This was probably the reason Bethune moved there. With the help of Fritz Brantner and Marian Scott, he opened the Montreal Children’s Creative Art Centre which was held in his apartment. The children who came on Saturday morning were from the poor families that Dr. Bethune attended to. He wanted to give them a chance to enjoy learning about art .

What really consumed Dr. Bethune that year was a vision for socialized medicine in Quebec and Canada. He inspired like-minded doctors, nurses, social workers and teachers, to form the Montreal Group for the Security of the People’s Health and their manifesto was presented to the public and the new Liberal Premier Adélard Godbout in August 1936. What disillusioned Dr. Bethune was not hostility to the proposal but the indifference. His relationship with Marian Scott, whom he was in love with, also disapointed him as it didn’t evolve beyond a friendship.

He was ready to make a radical change in his own life. He decided to go to Spain to fight the Fascists and offer his medical expertise on the battlefield. As a young man, he had joined the Ambulance Medical Corps in 1914 and had returned home from France with a shrapnel injury to his leg. In 1917, he had enlisted in the Royal Navy as a Surgeon-Lieutenant and served on an aircraft carrier for fourteen months.

A few weeks before his departure, he was invited to speak at Macdonald College in Ste Anne de Bellevue by Irving Layton, a young student with socialist sympathies who had started a series of lectures. Layton, who later became the outspoken world-reknowned Canadian poet, recorded in his memoir Waiting for the Messiah his encounter with  Norman Bethune:

“My first impression of Dr. Bethune was of a very intense man, nervous to the point of irritability. He was wearing a drab grey suit, nothing that would make one look twice….Though gaunt, his body exuded a tremendous dynamism, surprising his audience. What impressed me the most was the intentness of his gaze, the forceful conviction behind his words. Here was a man who seemed devoured by an idea, an obsession….”

In his “drab grey suit,” Dr. Bethune was no longer the bohemian surgeon but a doctor on a humanitarian mission to save lives which would lead him beyond Spain to his destiny in China. There, in a remote village, on November 12, 1939, he would die from blood poisoning after a cut in a finger became infected while he operated on a soldier. He was forty- nine years old.

Norman Bethune Monument - "Norman Bethune is honoured in downtown Montreal by this statue in a newly-designed public square." Credit: Alexis Hamel de Images Montréal http://www.imtl.org

At the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur, a medical library has been named la bibliothèque Norman Bethune. Not far from where he lived in the Shaughnessey Village, there is a Bethune Street in the City of Westmount.

The most important memorial is the newly-designed Place Norman-Bethune, a public square at the corner of De Maisonneuve Boulevard and Guy Street. There stands the statue of  Norman Bethune on a pedestal, a gift to the city of Montreal from the People’s Republic of China           .

At a conference on April 15, 2009 at Concordia University, Adrienne Clarkson, former governor general of Canada and now biographer of Norman Bethune, suggested that one of the reasons the internationally-known surgeon, medical inventor, visionary and humanitarian might not be recognized to the degree he should be in Canada is because he became a member of the Communist  Party in 1935. Certainly this is a well-timed biography of Norman Bethune as it coincides with the seventieth anniversary of his death which is being celebrated in the city of Montreal with special events and exhibitions.

            This volume is part of a series entitled Extraordinary Canadians edited by John Ralston Saul. He is the husband of Clarkson and their collaboration has turned out a brilliant book. In his Introduction, Saul states there is a need for this series whose aim is to “produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada.” Other “ethical leaders” chosen are as diverse as Lester B. Pearson, Big Bear, L.M. Montgomery, and René Lévesque.

            Certainly Clarkson’s Norman Bethune stands on its own. The stunning cover portrait by  Canadian artist Carl Shinkaruk paints Bethune as a fiery tortured figure with the gaunt cheeks of the tubercular. This arresting image evokes a self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, another haunted extraordinary man.

            Clarkson writes with analytic acumen of Bethune’s childhood on the Canadian Shield. He was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario from “generations of doctors” and “men of peace.” Bethune was the grandson of Norman Bethune, a surgeon whose life became a template for his namesake. In the 1850s, his ancestor had tended to the wounded soldiers on an Italian battlefield and was described by a government official as a “generous foreign volunteer …spurred to help us out of a deep sense of human generosity.” Similar admiring words were applied to his grandson in 1939 by government officials in China where he died. Bethune was given the name Bai Qiu En which translates to The Light which Pursues Kindness.

            Clarkson convincingly discusses how Bethune’s Presbytarian heritage shaped him for a life of service. His rebellion against his fundamentalist father, Reverend Malcolm Bethune, whom he claimed he “hated,” was an early visceral reaction against any form of oppression. This rebellion took on a wider scope in his adulthood as he fought against the medical establishment’s status quo and later the forces of fascism.

            At the Concordia University conference, Clarkson mentioned that it was time that Bethune be written about “from a woman’s point of view.” In her extensive research, Clarkson is the first biographer to make use of the journals of Marian Dale Scott, the well-known Canadian artist. As Clarkson defines her, she was Bethune’s “unique love of his life.”  At the time they met in 1935, Bethune was divorced from Frances Campbell Penney, a conservative woman from a prominent Edinburgh family. Marian was married to the well-known Montreal lawyer and poet, F.R. Scott. In a sensitive chapter with the title ” A Tiger of Sweetness, Fierceness and Delight,”  a line by Marian describing Bethune, Clarkson reveals through Bethune’s love letters and poems to her the depth of their creative and platonic relationship.

            As a young stretcher-bearer in the First World War, Bethune had survived a severe leg wound in France and had been hospitalized for six months, returning to continue his medical studies in Canada. At the age of thirty-six, he faced a far more difficult physical diagnosis that was like a death sentence. He had contracted tuberculosis in both lungs. TB was then epidemic as cancer is today and there was no known cure. Under the stress, Bethune and his wife divorced and she returned to Scotland. Unable to practice medicine, Bethune was admitted to the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York. His will to live was shaken and he planned his suicide. As an instinctive form of therapy, Bethune began to paint the interior walls of the cottage he lived in with murals he entitled “TB’s Progress.” When he heard of an experimental operation, he sought a doctor that was willing to perform it. The operation was a success though it left him disabled with only one functioning lung.

            This didn’t deter Bethune who decided to use his medical skills to eradicate this disease. In 1928, he accepted a prestigious position at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal where he worked alongside the “father of thoracic surgery in North America,” Dr. Edward Archibald.  Soon, Bethune clashed with his traditionalist mentor. Even though Bethune proved himself as a surgeon and even invented surgical tools that are still in use in the operating room today, Dr. Archibald decided to transfer him to another hospital, in effect dismissing him. As Clarkson explains, Bethune’s eccentric character could have been another reason:

            “The fact that Bethune changed his clothing as quickly as his moods was irritating to many as well. An apartment mate of his said that “his clothes (were) bought from the most expensive tailor in town….(he was) always insisting on white tie and tails at every appropriate occasion.”He was just as capable, however, of going out to a party wearing shoes, trousers, and an overcoat but no shirt or jacket; once, in response to a dare, he dressed as a lumberjack to do his hospital rounds.”

            Bethune didn’t agree with the concept of profit in medicine. In his practice in Montreal, he was often heard saying: “there are two kinds of tuberculosis: the rich man’s and the poor man’s. The rich man lives and the poor man dies.” At medical congresses he gave electrifying speeches that challenged his colleagues on this subject. In 1936, Bethune spearheaded a group of like-minded professionals, the Montreal Group for the Security of the People’s Health, which produced a manifesto for socialized medicine but it was ignored by his peers and the Quebec government. Not a man to be defeated, Bethune decided to go to Spain to fight the fascist army of General Franco. He was sponsored by the Canadian Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. In Spain, Bethune organized, with his Canadian team, the first mobile transfusion unit. Clarkson points out that this important contribution to the history of blood transfusion has yet to be fully recognized.

            The seeds for Bethune’s journey to China were planted in his religious childhood as Clarkson recounts how in the early twentieth century, China was regarded as the place for evangelization and many churches and institutions collected alms so they could sponsor missionaries to that country. In 1938, Bethune felt compelled to go to China under the auspices of the Canadian-American Medical Unit to help the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese invasion. Accompanied by the Canadian nurse Jean Ewen, who spoke Chinese fluently, Bethune trekked for weeks through rough mountainous landscape to get to his post as medical adviser to the Eighth Route Army. Ewen wrote a book about her experiences in China and Clarkson includes Ewen’s vivid account of the famous meeting in Yan’an between Bethune and the young Chairman Mao. In this chapter, Clarkson conveys the physical and emotional hardships that Bethune encountered as he performed his medical duties operating on the front line, setting up a model hospital, training Chinese teenage boys and girls as rudimentary nurses and doctors. One of Bethune’s inventions in China was a mobile operating room for the battlefield: “All the equipment was placed on three mules: the collapsible operating table, a full set of surgical instruments, anaesthetics, antiseptics, twenty-five wooden legs and arms.” Bethune spent much time typing letters to authorities and friends back home requesting urgently needed medical supplies. He also wrote articles for the Canadian and American newspapers, and medical texts and training manuals. His portable typewriter is now kept in the Bethune Museum in Shijiazhuang along with his stethoscope and other memorabilia.

            Danger never fazed Bethune whose dedication to saving the lives of the wounded included operating bare-handed if no surgical gloves were available. In the fall of 1939, at forty-nine years old, Bethune was frail from months of gruelling living conditions and overwhelming work, and when he nicked his finger during surgery he soon fell ill from blood poisoning. He’d been planning to return to Canada to raise funds for the Communist Army, but once he knew he was dying, he wrote his will which concluded: “So the last two years have been the most significant, the most meaningful years of my life.”

            The biography ends a bit quickly but more details can be found in the useful Chronology such as that Bethune’s remains are at the Martyrs’ Tomb in the same city as the Bethune Museum in China. There is an error that needs correcting for future editions which is the location of the memorial statue of Bethune in Montreal: it is not at the corner of Guy and Dorchester, but Guy and De Maisoneuve Streets.

            In Norman Bethune, Clarkson debunks myths and media sensationalism to capture the essence of this extraordinary man and Canadian. Like all larger-than-life people, Bethune transcended labels or contradictions and could be Communist and Christian, scientist and artist,  temperamental and tender. Clarkson advocates for Dr. Bethune’s further recognition in Canada and surely this volume will do this.