Little Known Things about the Life of Dr. Norman Bethune

Doctor Henry Norman Bethune (1890-1939) is widely known in China as a great internationalist who sacrificed his life for helping the Chinese people’s Resistance War against Japanese Aggression during the Second World War. Bethune died on November 12, 1939, of blood poisoning from a cut he received when performing surgery. After his death, a memorial meeting was held in Yan’an, the national Communist headquarters in Shaanxi Province. At the memorial, Mao Zedong made a speech entitled “In Memory of Norman Bethune”. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), nearly the entire Chinese population on the mainland knew about Mao’s speech as it became a must read for school students and many others across the country. Dr. Bethune, widely venerated in China, embodies a spirit of absolute selflessness. He is buried in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Shijiazhuang, the capital seat of Hebei Province in northern China. Some hospitals in China are named after him.

Since the founding of his museum in his hometown Gravenhurst in Canada, more things in his life have become known to Chinese people.

On July 30, 1937, Bethune by accident met a Chinese at a dinner party for medical professionals in Los Angels. The Chinese was Tao Xingzhi (1891-1946), a prominent educator in China. The July 7, 1937 incident marked the all-out Japanese invasion into China. Tao was on his tour around the world seeking help for Chinese who were fighting the Japanese invaders. Bethune was on a visit to Los Angels. Excited, the Canadian inquired about the situation in China. After learning that China needed medical help badly, Bethune made up his mind then and there and informed Tao that he had just decided to go to China. They discussed a few issues for his plans for travel and work in China. Tao jotted down the name of Bethune and the discussed points in his notebook.

Bethune assembled a medical team and put together medicine and equipment. They left for China on January 8, 1938 as a medical team dispatched by American and Canadian Communist Parities. Accompanied by an escort arranged by Zhou Enlai, the team arrived at Yan’an via Hankou. Mao Zedong met Bethune and his colleagues. Mao Zedong asked him to work at the hospital attached to the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army, but Bethune made a special request to go to the front in a borderland area striding Shanxi, Chahar (merged with Hebei Province in 1952) and Hebei provinces.

Doctor Bethune’s Marriage

Bethune was known as an unmarried man without children when he came to China. He had had a marriage.

In 1919, Bethune began an internship in London and later he went to Edinburgh where he stayed and sat for an examination and finally earned the FRCS qualification at the Royal College of Surgeons. It was in Edinburgh that Bethune met the strikingly beautiful Frances Penny. Shortly after the examination, they traveled together for 20 days. They got married in 1923 and moved to Detroit, USA, where Bethune started private practice and took a part-time job as an instructor at the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery.

In 1926 Bethune contracted tuberculosis due to overwork and from his close contact with the poor. He sought treatment at the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Believing he was dying, he insisted his wife divorce him and return to her native Scotland. So she did.

While convalescing, Bethune read about a radical new treatment for tuberculosis called pneumothorax. This involved artificially collapsing the diseased lung, thus allowing it to rest and heal itself. The physicians at the Trudeau thought this procedure was too risky. But Bethune insisted. He had the operation performed and made a full and complete recovery.

Upon recuperation Bethune immediately wrote to his ex-wife and proposed marriage again. At first she refused but eventually the two were remarried in 1929. The marriage did not last long, though. They were divorced again for a final time in 1933.

Bethune missed her at the final moment of his life in Huangshikou Village. In his will he asked the International Support China Committee to send money to Frances Penny for her life, explain to her that he was sorry and tell her he had had happiness with her.

Friendship between Bethune and Hall

Bethune arrived at Quyang County in 1938 and heard the name of Kathleen Hall (1896-1970), a New Zealand woman working for Anglican Church of New Zealand since 1923. She had worked as a nurse at Anguo County Church Hospital. In 1937, she set up a hospital in Songjiazhuang Village in Quyang County. By 1938, the area lay in no man’s land between Japanese-occupied area and the mountain headquarters of the Eight Route Army. The hospital took in local villagers as well as wounded soldiers of the Eighth Route Army. With an American passport, Hall was able to make trips to Beiping (today’s Beijing) to collect supplies for the village hospital. Bethune and Hall met. As the military hospital and the battlefield emergency team under the direction of Bethune lacked medical supplies, Bethune, the medical advisor to the Eighth Route Army, asked Hall if she could bring back medical supplies for the resistance. She agreed.

Kathleen Hall made more than 30 trips to Beiping in one year to carry back medical supplies for the Eighth Route Army. Hall also organized intellectuals and medical professionals to join the Eighth Route Army. When Hall’s mission hospital sent patients who needed difficult surgery to Bethune, Bethune was most willing to operate on them. Bethune sent wounded soldiers to Beiping through the arrangements of Hall.

Bethune and Hall cared for each other. Bethune gave Hall a camp bed and some canned food captured on the battlefield from the Japanese soldiers. Hall now and then invited Bethune to come and enjoy a cup of coffee. She bought English cigarettes from Beiping and sent them to Bethune. Bethune put Songjiazhuang on his map and gave her alert whenever he learned Japanese forces were going to attack the region.

Finally, the Japanese noticed Kathleen’s help to the Eighth Route Army. The mission hospital was destroyed and she was forced to leave China. When she finally managed to come back to Hebei Province, she found Bethune had died.

After her return to New Zealand, she did a very good job of promoting friendship between New Zealand and China. She retired to Auckland in 1956 and from there she was involved in setting up branches of the New Zealand China Society around the country. In 1960, she was invited to take part in the national day celebration in Beijing. During her visit to China, she made a special trip and visited the Bethune’s tomb in Shijiazhuang.

A Man of Letters

It has been widely known that Bethune kept a diary that recorded what he saw and did in his days in China and that he wrote textbooks to train Chinese doctors and nurses. But it was little known that he wrote a short story and published it in Canada and America during his work in China.

Shortly after he passed away in November, 1939, it was found that he had a short story published in Progress Weekly, an American publication. The story was about an old farmer who found an unexploded cannon ball in his field. The crop in the field had been ruined by the Japanese. The angry farmer dug up the cannon-ball and carried it all the way to the resistance forces where his son was a soldier. The old man hoped the cannon-ball might be useful. After finding his son had become a mature man and brave soldier, the old farmer grew confident that the Chinese people would be able to drive the Japanese invaders out of China.

In May, 1940, the story was translated into Chinese and published in a literary magazine in Hong Kong. It won very good reviews. Critics commented that the story was a truthful report on China’s war efforts and it was better than some stories and reports written by journalists unfamiliar with the real situations in the small resistance base areas surrounded by the Japanese-occupied areas.

The exhibits at the Bethune Memorial in Gravenhurst show that Bethune was a passionate writer. As a middle school student, he published short stories and poems in the school journal and local newspapers. During World War I he wrote a lot about his battlefield experiences when he was on the medical teams of France and Britain. He wrote about 40 passionate letters to Frances Penny in the year before they got married. His professional papers were of high quality and excellent style. Those who worked with Bethune in China remember that Bethune wrote and published more than one story in America and Canada.