26th greatest Canadian

Norman Bethune
wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bethune

“…In the CBC’s The Greatest Canadian program in 2004, he was voted the 26th Greatest Canadian by viewers…

Political activities

Bethune became increasingly concerned with the socioeconomic aspects of disease. As a concerned doctor in Montreal during the economic depression years of the 1930s, 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 was an early proponent of socialized medicine and formed the Montreal Group for the Security of People’s Health. In 1935 Bethune travelled to the Soviet Union to observe firsthand their system of health care. During this year he became a committed Communist and joined the Communist Party of Canada. When returning from the Spanish Civil War to raise support for the Loyalist cause, he openly identified with the Communist cause.
Spanish Civil War
Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit which operated during the Spanish Civil War. Dr Norman Bethune is to the right (c. 1936/37, Spain).

Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, with the financial backing of the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, Bethune went to Spain to offer his services to the government (Loyalist) forces. He arrived in Madrid on November 3.

Unable to find a place where he could be used as a surgeon, he seized on an idea which may have been inspired by his limited experience of administering blood transfusions as Head of Thoracic Surgery at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal between 1932 and 1936. The idea was to set up a mobile blood transfusion service by which he could take blood donated by civilians in bottles to wounded soldiers near the front lines. Though Bethune’s unit, the Servicio canadiense de transfusión de sangre, was not the first of its kind—a similar service had been set up in Barcelona by a Spanish haematologist, Dr. Frederic Durán-Jordà, and had been functioning since September—Bethune’s Madrid-based unit covered a far wider area of operation.[13]

Bethune returned to Canada on June 6, 1937, where he went on a speaking tour to raise money and volunteers for the Spanish Civil War.

Shortly before leaving for Spain, Bethune wrote the following poem, published in the July 1937 edition of The Canadian Forum:

And this same pallid moon tonight,
Which rides so quietly, clear and high,
The mirror of our pale and troubled gaze,
Raised to a cool Canadian sky.

Above the shattered mountain tops,
Last night, rose low and wild and red,
Reflecting back from her illumined shield,
The blood bespattered faces of the dead.

To that pale disc, we raise our clenched fists,
And to those nameless dead our vows renew,
“Comrades, who fought for freedom and the future world,
Who died for us, we will remember you.”

China
Norman Bethune in China with Nie Rongzhen (centre) and an interpreter, 1938.
Statue of Bethune at Wanping Fortress, Beijing

In January 1938 Bethune travelled to Yan’an in the Shanbei region of Shanxi province in China. There he joined the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong. The Lebanese-American doctor George Hatem, who had come to Yan’an earlier, was instrumental in helping Bethune get started at his task of organizing medical services for the front and the region.[14]

In China, Bethune performed emergency battlefield surgical operations on war casualties and established training for doctors, nurses, and orderlies.[15] He did not distinguish between casualties.[4][16]

Bethune had thoughts of medicinal disciplines and states:

Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels. … Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism … Let us say to the people not ‘ How much have you got?’ but ‘ How best can we serve you?'[17][18][19]

In the summer of 1939 Bethune was appointed medical advisor to the Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) Border Region Military District, under the direction of General Nie Rongzhen.[20]

Stationed with the Communist Party of China’s Eighth Route Army in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Bethune cut his finger while operating on a soldier. Probably due to his weakened state, he contracted septicaemia (blood poisoning) and died of his wounds on November 12, 1939.[21]

His last will in China was recorded shortly before his death, reading:

Dear Commander Nie, Today I feel really bad. Probably I have to say farewell to you forever! Please send a letter to Tim Buck the General Secretary of Canadian Communist Party. Address is No.10, Wellington Street, Toronto, Canada. Please also make a copy for Committee on International Aid to China and Democratic Alliance of Canada, tell them, I am very happy here… Please give my Kodak Retina II camera to comrade Sha Fei. Norman Bethune, 04:20pm, November 11th, 1939.[22]

Legacy
Reverend Malcolm Bethune’s study in Gravenhurst (father of Norman).

Virtually unknown in his homeland during his lifetime, Bethune received international recognition when Chairman Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China published his essay entitled In Memory of Norman Bethune (Chinese: 紀念白求恩),[23] which documented the final months of the doctor’s life in China. Almost the entire Chinese population knew about the essay which had become required reading in China’s elementary schools during the 1960s.[24][25] Grateful of Bethune’s altruistic help to China, the nation’s normal elementary school text book still has the essay today:

Comrade Bethune’s spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people. Every Communist must learn from him. … We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very useful to the people. A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.[26][27][28][29]

Bethune is one of the few Westerners to whom China has dedicated statues, of which many have been erected in his honour throughout the country. He is buried in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, where his tomb and memorial hall lie opposite the tomb of Dwarkanath Kotnis, an Indian doctor also honoured for his humanitarian contribution to the Chinese. One of the three honoured in this memorial is the hero of the Academy Award–winning film, Chariots of Fire, Reverend Eric Liddell of Scotland. He died while incarcerated in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Shandong Province.

Elsewhere in China, Norman Bethune University of Medical Sciences[zh] in Changchun city, Jilin province, was one of the eleven national medical universities directly subordinated to Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China. The predecessor of this University was the Hygiene School of Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region[zh] of the Eighth Route Army (八路军晋察冀军区卫生学校 in Chinese) founded in 1939 by Bethune’s advocacy. The school developed with Bethune Hygiene School (Feb 16, 1940), Bethune Medical School (Jan 1946), Bethune Medical University (June 1946),Medical University of North China[zh] (1948), First Military Medical University[zh] (1951 in Tianjin), moved to Changchun in 1954, Medical College of Changchun (July 1958), Medical University of Jilin (June 1959), Norman Bethune University of Medical Sciences (March 1978), merged into Jilin University as Norman Bethune Health Science Center of Jilin University[zh] in 2000. There are at least three dedicated statues of Bethune in this university: in the west square of College of Basic Medicine, in the Second Affiliated Hospital and in the Third Affiliated Hospital.

He is also commemorated at three institutions in Shijiazhuang – Bethune Military Medical College, Bethune Specialized Medical College and Bethune International Peace Hospital. In Canada, Norman Bethune College at York University, and Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate Institute (a secondary school) in Scarborough, Ontario, are named after him….see link..
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Bethune’s essay ‘Wounds’:
link:https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/norman-bethune-wounds/