By James Aitchison

Few Westerners are revered in China.  But one Canadian doctor remains a national hero to this day, honoured in school history books and by statues throughout the country.

How his name, Bethune, was translated into Chinese indicates his unique status.  When choosing Chinese equivalents to Western surnames, characters with suitable meanings must phonetically match their Western syllables.  Thus, Bethune became Bai Qiu-en, which means “the white who bestows kindness”. 

Bethune’s kindness was recognised by Chairman Mao Zedong, the only Westerner so upheld as an example for his countrymen to follow.

Henry Norman Bethune was born in 1890 at Gravenhurst, Ontario.  His ancestors had practised medicine in the Scottish Highlands since the Middle Ages.  Migrating to Canada, the family traded in furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company.  Bethune’s father was a strict Presbyterian preacher and his mother, by all accounts, domineering.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Bethune grew up an atheist.  Interestingly, actor Christopher Plummer was a distant relative.

Bethune was destined to become a doctor.  Serving as a stretcher-bearer in the European battlefields of World War I, he returned to Canada and completed his medical studies.  In 1919, he earned his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.  After two short-lived marriages to the same woman, he perfected his skills as a thoracic surgeon, developing new surgical tools such as the Bethune Rib Shears, which remain in use today.

Memorial in Wanping, Beijing

Bethune’s early disillusionment with the Canadian health system intensified.  He frequently gave his services free to the poor.  He called for socialised medicine and universal health care for all, arguing that:

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?’

Embittered by government inaction, he visited Soviet Russia in 1935 to study its free health care system.  He returned to Canada, a committed Communist.

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Bethune did not hesitate; he offered his services to the socialist government forces fighting Franco’s Fascists.  While there, he pioneered a mobile blood transfusion service.

In 1938, with the Japanese invasion causing widespread devastation and suffering in China, Bethune joined Mao Zedong’s Communists in Yan’an in the Shanbei region of Shaanxi Province.  Bethune rapidly earned widespread respect and admiration as he performed emergency surgery on the battlefield, tended to sick villagers, and trained doctors, nurses, and orderlies.

Ironically, Bethune would die of blood poisoning on 12 November 1939.  While retrieving bone fragments from a wounded soldier’s leg, he cut his left middle finger.  Three days later, weakened by his frenetic workload and malnourishment, he contracted septicaemia.  On the eve of his death, he gave his beloved Kodak camera to one of his comrades.

Chairman Mao Zedong published a eulogy to Norman Bethune, documenting the final months of the doctor’s life.  The essay appears in Chinese elementary school texts to this day:

“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 warmheartedness 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.”

Virtually unknown in his homeland, Bethune was elevated to national hero status in China.  Buried in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in Hebei Province, his name is carried by many medical schools in China.

 Nowadays, thanks to many books and movies, “The white who bestows kindness” is commemorated in Canada as well as his adopted homeland of China.