Heart of Spain

The first film made by the New York-based radical documentary production company Frontier Films, Heart of Spain (1937) focuses on the Hispano-Canadian Blood Transfusion Institute created by Canadian doctor Norman Bethune (1890-1939). 

A distinguished thoracic surgeon, during the Depression Bethune became an advocate for socialized medicine and in 1935, after visiting the Soviet Union, he joined the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Bethune arrived in Madrid in November 1936 as head of the medical mission sent by the Canadian Committee for the Defence of Spanish Democracy, an organization created by a number of left-wing groups including the CPC. Inspired by his experience as a stretcher-bearer during World War I where he saw wounded soldiers die from loss of blood, he came up with the idea of creating a service to take refrigerated blood to the front.  

The Hispano-Canadian Blood Transfusion Institute performed its first transfusion on 3 January 1937 and soon it was transporting blood along almost one thousand kilometres of front. Bethune then proposed that the Republican government create a unified blood transfusion service under his leadership. Instead, the government folded Bethune’s operation into a new organization which he would run along with two Spanish doctors. The prickly Bethune kicked up such a fuss that he was quickly sent back to Canada. He had been in Spain barely six months. 

Back in Canada, Bethune went on a speaking tour to raise funds for the Committee for the Defence of Spanish Democracy. He also found a new cause for which to fight: China. In January 1938 he was in Ya’nan performing operations while helping train the doctors and nurses in Mao Zedong’s army. He died from septicemia in November 1939 after cutting a finger during an operation. Soon after, Mao published his essay In Memory of Norman Bethune which became required reading in China’s primary schools in the 1960s and remains in textbooks today.  

The way Bethune is remembered in Canada has changed since his death in 1939. Except among communist supporters and sympathizers, his death in China received limited coverage. During the Cold War era, Canadians ignored Bethune’s memory and role in Spain and China because they were hostile to communism. The arrival of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000) as Prime Minister of Canada in 1968 and his determination to develop closer diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China at the beginning of the 1970s, triggered a change of perception. Bethune was celebrated for his humanitarian role in China. The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada recognized Bethune as a person of national historic significance in 1972. A year later, the federal government bought the house in Gravenhurst, Ontario where Bethune was born, and Parks Canada opened a museum there in 1976. Since the 1970s, Bethune’s role in China has been commemorated with statues, plaques, and buildings named in his honour, notably at York University.