Canadian physician Norman Bethune (1890-1939) was a disturbing hero. Saved from pleurisy by this doctor in 1934, at the age of 14, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, almost 60 years later, spoke of him as a “brilliant, passionate, imaginative, seductive man”. Biographies paint a more contrasting portrait of the man. Bethune, we learn, could be arrogant and egocentric; he was drawn to alcohol and seduction, as well as attracted to danger and strong sensations.
It is impossible, however, to deny the heroic nature of his journey. In 1936-1937, Bethune joined the International Brigades in Spain to fight Franco’s fascist troops. There he leads a blood transfusion team on the front.
In 1938-1939, in China, he joined Mao’s army which resisted the Japanese invasion. He trains nurses and doctors there, carries out blood transfusions and operates with the means at hand. His team is even credited with the feat of operating 115 soldiers in 69 hours in April 1939.
On November 12 of that same year, he died in office, after contracting sepsis during an operation. On his deathbed, he entrusts his last wishes to a brother in arms, asking him to tell all his friends that he was very happy.
Man, obviously, is larger than life. In China, from his death until today, he is worshiped. Mao, who had met him on the front, praised him in his Little red book. Un hospital in the country bears his name and a museum is dedicated to him. In Canada and Quebec, however, recognition will be slow in coming. The reason is simple: Bethune was a communist. In the middle of the last century, such a position in North America made you undesirable.
In Returning from China. norman Bethune in memory (PUL, 2023, 218 pages), the historian Marc St-Pierre focuses precisely on the representations of man, that is to say on the ways of conceiving his life and his work. “The cult of great men, writes St-Pierre drawing inspiration from the historian Georges Minois, is above all a social indicator. To grant or refuse our admiration to a character is always, for an individual or for a society, to reveal oneself. In this sense, to study the reception given to the figure of Bethune by Canadian, Quebec and Chinese societies is to reveal a facet of the historical evolution of their mentality.
Before going to practice war medicine on the Spanish and Chinese fronts, Bethune had left his mark on the country. A medical graduate of the University of Toronto in 1916 after enlisting as a stretcher-bearer in the Canadian army during the First World War, Bethune first practiced in Detroit.
In 1926, tuberculosis struck him. His period of convalescence is accompanied by an ideological conversion. He then realizes that disease is often linked to social conditions and that the aim of medicine, therefore, should not be the personal enrichment of the doctor, but the help offered to those who are really in need.
“Let’s purify medicine of the notion of individual profit, let’s purify our profession of individualistic rapacity,” he said in a statement that hasn’t aged a bit. Bethume was a surgeon in Montreal from 1928 to 1936. With colleagues, he presented a report to the Quebec government in 1936, in which he pleaded for socialized medicine. That doesn’t make him popular in the medical profession.
When he died three years later, Bethune was almost considered a traitor in Canada and Quebec, where anti-communism was in full swing. We have to wait until the end of the 1950s, explains St-Pierre, to witness a reappearance of the character in the public space, in particular through a novel by the famous writer Hugh MacLennan.
In 1958, an agreement to sell Canadian wheat to China showed people here that Bethune was being treated as a hero there. Moreover, the socialized medicine that the latter defended 30 years earlier has become a desired project. The evil communist doctor, we then discover, had humanitarian qualities.
His official Canadian heroization, however, notes St-Pierre, stems from a basely instrumental recovery carried out by the Canadian government. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in the 1970s, wanted to do business with China and promoted Canada’s admiration for Bethune in order to seduce the Chinese. In 2012, in the same spirit, the Conservative minister Tony Clement will praise Bethune by saluting his “entrepreneurship”. Rather annoying.
Alive, Bethune, a true hero of social justice and medicine at the service of all, would have rightly despised these opportunists.