Norman Bethune
Norman Bethune was a great Canadian physician and humanitarian, who is still remembered for his services during Spanish Civil War.
Henry Norman Bethune was a Canadian thoracic surgeon, medical innovator, and political activist whose service with Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War and with Chinese Communist troops in the Second Sino-Japanese War made him a household name in the People's Republic of China. Born in Gravenhurst, Ontario, in 1890, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he served as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War and was wounded at Ypres in 1915.
After completing his medical degree at the University of Toronto in 1916 and naval service in the Royal Navy, he trained in surgery in Edinburgh and London, then specialised in thoracic surgery at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal under Edward Archibald. He invented or redesigned more than a dozen surgical instruments, several still in use, and campaigned for socialised medicine in Quebec.
Joining the Communist Party of Canada in 1935, Bethune travelled to Spain in 1936 and organised the world's first mobile blood-transfusion service, the Servicio Canadiense de Transfusión de Sangre, delivering refrigerated blood to front-line casualties around Madrid. In January 1938 he reached Yan'an and joined Mao Zedong's Eighth Route Army medical service in Hebei province.
He died of septicaemia from an operating-table cut in November 1939 in Huangshikou, Hebei. Mao's eulogy In Memory of Norman Bethune became required reading during the Cultural Revolution.
The name Norman is a masculine name of Germanic origin meaning "northman" or "man of the north," originally referring to the Norse settlers of Normandy in northern France. Brought to Britain after the Norman Conquest as both surname and given name, it remained common in nineteenth-century Ontario Presbyterian families like his own.
About the name Norman
Gender: Male · Origin: French
From The North