Dr. Norman Bethune performing surgery in China

This photograph was taken in the village of Sunjiazhuang in Laiyuan county, located in a mountainous, remote and isolated are on the border between Hebei and Shanxi provinces. It shows the Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune, performing an operation without gloves and with barely any equipment in a war zone where the Communists’ Eighth Route Army, which had been integrated into the Nationalist army following the creation of the Second United Front, was fighting the Japanese. A few days later, Bethune cut himself with a scalpel. Even though the wound got infected, Bethune followed the Chinese troops  through the mountainous terrain and continued operating until he died on November 12. Communist leader Mao Zedong would write an obituary, “In memory of Norman Bethune” in which he extolled him as a symbol of international Communism. Since then, he has been one of the best known and most esteemed foreigners in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Following his death, the Bethune International Peace Hospital was built in Communist controlled territory. The hospital had the support of Soong Ching-ling, the widow of de Sun Yat-sen, and a delegation of Indian doctors led by Menhanlal Atal, who had served the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. Another of the Indian doctors was the hospital’s first director. Following the surrender of Japan, another doctor who had served in Spain, Leo Eloesser from the United States, spent a long time at the hospital as a representative of UNICEF. There he saw how some of the practices he had known in Spain, such as the creation of networks of mobile hospitals and hiding medical facilities in places like caves and private residences to prevent them from being bombed from the air, had been transplanted to China.

Following the creation of the PRC, the Bethune International Peace Hospital became a reference point and, thanks to the use of Mao’s elegy in the schools and the publication of Zhou Erfu’s biography in 1946, Bethune himself became a revered figure. During the 1950s, the story of Bethune was popularized in illustrated books and, later, through television series. His fame in China endures. (This contrasts with the situation in Canada, where the first biography was not published until 1952, and the figure of Bethune was largely ignored until it was adopted by the Canadian government in the 1970s as part of the process of establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.)