Norman Bethune: Doctor of the Revolution
- By Thomas S. Axworthy
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China Today, June 14, 2017
One Who Always Enlightens Us
My mother-in-law, Anne Carpenter, knew and worked with Bethune during the 1930s in Quebec. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the youngest of six girls, Anne demonstrated an adventurous spirit by moving to Quebec to practice in Sherbrooke soon after graduating as a nurse in Manitoba. At that time, it was not common for young women to move half a continent away to take a job or practice a profession, certainly not in Quebec where a great majority of the citizens spoke French. Dr. Wendell MacLeod, a colleague of Bethune, wrote that women did not have an easy time of it in the Montreal medical establishment of the day. It was not until 1922 that the first woman intern in medicine was accepted and when the second woman to become an intern was asked to take over ward patients, she was relegated to the room reserved for alcoholics. Women physicians were not admitted to the doctors’ dining room until 1942! This was the medical world that greeted Anne Carpenter as a young female professional.
Anne’s assessment of Bethune was succinct: “brilliant but difficult,” she told me. Her judgment has been vindicated by a score of historians. Brilliant, Bethune certainly was. He invented or re-designed 12 medical and surgical instruments, some of which are still used today. He wrote a score of research papers and delivered them to professional associations across North America. He had the temperament of an artist and painted murals while resting in the sanatorium in the 1920s while he was recovering from tuberculosis. Later, he established an art school in Montreal for underprivileged students. He wrote poetry and his composition, Red Moon, is a haunting story of death in Spain. He was a dynamic speaker who spoke to thousands of Canadians and Americans on a transnational tour in 1937, sounding the alarm about the threats of fascism. And while in Spain, he made several radio broadcasts to North America. He was a brilliant communicator in addition to being a brilliant surgeon.
But he was difficult in equal measure. He always treated his patients with sensitivity and concern, and he established health clinics where he treated those who could not afford to pay. Yet the same generosity was not extended to his colleagues: he was impatient with nurses and doctors during operations and a colleague remembers him even throwing instruments in a fit of anger.
Bethune still serves as an exemplar of the revolutionary spirit. Once he had found his mission in life – first to eradicate tuberculosis, then to fight Fascists in Spain and finally to fight the Japanese imperialists in China – he performed extraordinary feats. In April 1939 for example, during the battle of Qihui, led by General He Long against the Japanese, Bethune and his team performed 115 operations in just 69 hours! Even in his own time, he became a legend to the soldiers of the Eighth Route Army.
But Bethune is more than just a historical artifact. In the 1920s, he made the connection between the tuberculosis in his patients and the wider social and political ills of poverty, societal degradation and inequality. To use modern phraseology, he was an early practitioner of the “social determinants of health.” Today he would make the connection between the health of the environment and our individual wellbeing. Climate change is resulting in warmer temperatures generally, shorter winters, hotter summers, and more extreme weather everywhere. In Europe, in 2003, heat and air pollution caused in excess of 35,000 deaths. The Canadian Medical Association estimates that Canada’s air pollution is responsible for 21,000 premature deaths a year and 92,000 emergency room visits. Beijing has one of the worst smog ratios in the world and pollution from coal fired power plants has meant that 90 percent of Chinese citizens are exposed to at least 120 hours of unhealthy air annually. Climate change could be responsible for as many as 250,000 deaths annually according to the Lancet medical journal.
Norman Bethune loved the clean air and beautiful woods of the Canadian North. He was an outdoorsman as well as being a specialist in surgery and respiratory medicine. He would instantly connect the bad conditions of smog with the rising incidence of strokes, heart disease and lung cancer, just as he connected tuberculosis with bad sanitation. He would urge China to take the lead in guiding both itself and the world towards planetary health in order to ensure our individual health.
Wendell Berry, an American poet and farmer, has it right when he argues, “We have lived our lives on the assumption that what was good for us was good for the world... Now we must live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world would be good for us.”
Were he still with us, Bethune would wholeheartedly support that idea but he would also employ his incredible energy to help make a sustainable planet a reality. Adrienne Clarkson concludes her excellent biography by stating that a billion and a half Chinese know Bethune as Bai Qiu En – the light who pursues kindness. Today Bethune would be known as the light leading us towards better planetary health.
THOMAS S. AXWORTHY is Secretary General of the Interaction Council and a visiting professor at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)