This Week in the Public Domain: Canadian Communist Norman Bethune’s Awkward Team Photo
This week’s edition of the public domain series is an Owen Sound Collegiate Institute team photograph circa 1905 featuring famous Canadian physician, communist, and war-time medic Norman Bethune. Although the portrait is slightly awkward, especially due to the crop, it’s a great piece of archival history. Bethune (the one on the right, whose face you can see) is considered a hero in both Canada and China, which is a distinction that not many people have ever claimed.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Bethune “became increasingly disillusioned with surgical treatment and 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. …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 first hand their system of health care.”
Bethune then travelled to Spain to aid the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. According to his New World Encyclopedia entry, “Bethune’s work in Spain in developing mobile medical units was the model for the later development of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units. The need to provide blood transfusions in a battlefield led him to develop the first practical method for transporting blood.”
In 1938, Bethune went to China to join the Communist side in its war against Japan. He died November 12, 1939, of blood poisoning from a cut he received when performing surgery.
It seems to me that he would make a perfect subject for a Hark! A Vagrant cartoon. In the meantime, here is a nice little biographical video about him. And here is a video of author Roderick Stewart reading an excerpt of his Bethune biography. Enjoy.
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