n Informal Portrai
Bethtme
The Montreal Tfears
"The authors' reminiscences add a new dimension to Bethune's life and
career in Montreal and give us more information than is found in the
conventional biography."
William French, The Globe & Mail.
"Bethune: The Montreal Years is quite an achievement. It is full of insights
available only to those who have had contact with a famous figure."
The Montreal Gazette.
Three of Norman Bethune's friends and close associates from Montreal in the
Thirties have collaborated to write this informal portrait of Bethune during a
critical and fascinating period of his life.
Soon after he returned to Canada to work as a hospital surgeon, Montreal
was in the grip of the Depression. During his research on tuberculosis, he
was struck by the worsening economic conditions which were increasing the
number of TB victims. Like many other intellectuals and professionals, he
was drawn towards the political left as he tried to understand the basis for the
economic crisis.
Along with several other distinguished Canadian doctors, Bethune went to
Russia in 1935 and saw for himself a system in which health care was
provided free to everyone. On his return he threw much of his enormous
energy into political work inside his profession, became a member of the
Communist Party and organized a group that developed proposals for
radical changes in the Quebec medical and health services. His growing
political convictions then led him to Spain and eventually to China.
The authors of this book were all involved with Norman Bethune and his
work during this period. Each provides a unique personal portrait of
Bethune, his friends and his work, and together they convey their great
affection and respect for this distinguished Canadian.
Painting on front cover by Fritz Brandtner
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
ISBN 0-88862-213-9
Bethtine
The Montreal Tfears
An Informal Portrait
Bethune
The Montreal "Years
\^ndell MacLeod, Libbie Park and Stanley Ryerson
An Informal Portrait
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
Toronto 1978
Copyright © 1978 by James Lorimer & Company, Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
ISBN 0-88862-212-0 cloth
Design: Don Fernley
James Lorimer & Company, Publishers
Egerton Ryerson Memorial Building
35 Britain Street
Toronto, Ontario
Printed and bound in Canada
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
MacLeod, Wendell.
Bethune
ISBN 0-88862-212-0
1. Bethune, Norman, 1890-1939. 2. Surgeons—Canada—
Biography. I. Park, Libbie. II. Ryerson, Stanley B., 1911-
R464.B4M26 617'.092'4 C78-001446-4
Contents
Introduction 7
Part One/Dr. Norman Bethune/Wendell MacLeod
Predestination 7 7
McGill and the Royal Vic 25
Bethune in the Twenties 34
A Different Kind of Surgeon 39
From the Royal Vic to Sacre-Coeur 51
The Health Study Group 59
Epilogue and Notes on Sources 67
Part Two/Norman Bethune as I Knew Him/Libbie Park
First Impressions 73
The Way It Was 82
Common Interests 93
Rocking the Medical Boat 702
The Move to Beaver Hall Square 772
For the Security of the People's Health 720
Will You Come? 725
Acknowledgements 134
Part Three/Comrade Beth/Stanley Ryerson
The Other Montreal 137
Bethune Makes His Choice 145
"A Natural Dialectic" 757
Dimensions of Conflict 757
Action the Issue 161
Notes on Sources 167
Acknowledgements
We all appreciate the difficulties of a publisher in dealing with
a single author, but in this case there have been three of us
and we want to express our admiration for the patience and
fortitude with which Jim Lorimer and his staff assumed this
three-fold burden, and our gratitude for editorial advice and
encouragement. We acknowledge with thanks the support for
our work provided by the Ontario Arts Council.
J. W.M.
L.C.P.
S.B.R.
Introduction
All three of us knew Norman Bethune in Montreal, for a
longer or shorter period. Each of us had a working rela-
tionship with him that gave us an opportunity to become
acquainted in a personal way. We chose to write about the
Montreal period of Bethune's life, from his arrival there in
April 1928 to his departure for Spain in October 1936. What
we have undertaken is not a biography but an examination of
an important formative period, one that has not been ade-
quately dealt with in other works on Bethune and to that
extent has not been fully understood.
Forty years after the events we came together feeling that
we had something to say, something to add to what has al-
ready been written.
We came together with different backgrounds in our pro-
fessional training, in our subsequent lines of work, in our po-
litical positions, and in the circumstances of our relations with
Bethune.
All of us knew him but at the time not all of us knew each
other. Two of us (MacLeod and Ryerson) had not met until
our first encounter as a trio of would-be collaborators in
March 1977. Two of us (MacLeod, Park) worked together
with Bethune in the Montreal Group for the Security of the
People's Health and did not meet again until 1974. Two of us
(Park, Ryerson) had been in contact since the time of Be-
Bethune: The Montreal Years
thune's days in Montreal, separated quite often by geogra-
phy.
We decided that we should each write from his or her own
point of view about the specific areas in which each of us
knew and worked with Bethune, whether in medicine, with
the health group, socially or politically.
Differing then and now on many matters, there would
probably always have been basic agreement among us on the
key questions under discussion when we knew Bethune. We
shared his point of view that the old system of providing
medical care on a fee for service basis, a fee paid by the pa-
tient to the doctor, was completely inadequate; we all in
different ways supported the elected government of Spain
against a fascist uprising; we were all sympathetic to the
struggle of the Chinese people. On none of these views has
the passage of time suggested a need to revise previously held
opinions.
And we share the conviction that Norman Bethune was
an extraordinarily significant person whose friendship we still
prize dearly. We know a good deal about the complexity of
his make-up. We are familiar with his rigorous effort during
this period to tackle problems that lay within him, as well as
those around him and beyond the horizon.
We believe that an understanding of Bethune's personal
growth by stages of increasing breadth and depth as he
reacted swiftly and honestly to each fresh insight into human
needs and into the paradoxes of society can serve as a chal-
lenging example to those who care about a world that has too
much of injustice and apathy.
Norman Bethune was an angry man, a man roused to
anger by stupidity, by bureaucracy, tyranny, brutality, by the
contradictions and absurdities of the society around him, by
subservience to those in power.
Introduction
Norman Bethune was a compassionate man, with compas-
sion for the poor and sick who were dying from remediable
diseases when scientific advances made it possible to prevent
and cure those diseases, and when the medical profession
could not afford to make its knowledge and services available
at prices people could pay.
And Norman Bethune was a man of action. It isn't neces-
sary to be a Marxist to appreciate that a philosophy of action
leading or intended to lead towards a society in which "the
free development of each is the condition for the free develop-
ment of all" would appeal to a man like Bethune, would and
did inspire him naturally and normally from his point of view
to a line of action that has made him an international hero.
Norman Bethune was and would have been a rebel with-
out an awareness of the teachings of Karl Marx, but the
awareness came about and made him a disciplined (the word
may seem over-emphatic to many who knew him) participant
in a cause. It was during his Montreal years that this aware-
ness took shape, and those years constitute a period crucial to
an understanding of his later achievements in Spain and
China.
We say this although he was born in Gravenhurst, On-
tario and was brought up in northern and rural Ontario,
studied at the University of Toronto, went overseas in World
War I with an Ontario unit, and graduated from the Univer-
sity of Toronto.
All those years and that experience had an influence on
him that helped to form his character. However, it was in
Montreal that the rebellious surgeon, impatient at the contra-
dictions and style of work in his profession, found an organi-
sational form for that rebellion, a form that suited him and
impelled him into action in Spain and China, in each case as a
fighter for a cause he believed in passionately.
Bethune: The Montreal Years
The bare facts of Norman Bethune's life are easily told.
He was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario on March 3, 1890.
He died at Huang-shih K'ou, China, on November 12, 1939.
Brought up in Northern Ontario, he studied at the Uni-
versity of Toronto, worked as a teacher, entered medical
school, broke off his studies to enlist in World War I, was
wounded, sent back to Canada, completed his medical studies
and re-enlisted.
After the war he studied and worked in British hospitals,
and in 1923 married Frances Penney (they were divorced in
1927, re-married in 1929, re-divorced in 1933). In 1924 Be-
thune and his wife returned to Canada and shortly thereafter
he set up private practice in Detroit.
In 1926 he developed tuberculosis and spent a year in
sanatoria, where he became interested in thoracic surgery.
In 1928 he began to work with Dr. Archibald at the Royal
Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Asked to leave in 1933, he
accepted a position at Sacre-Coeur Hospital as head of tho-
racic surgery.
In August 1935 he attended the Fifteenth International
Physiological Congress in Leningrad and Moscow. In No-
vember 1935 he joined the Communist Party of Canada and
later that autumn formed the Montreal Group for the Secu-
rity of the People's Health. In the spring of 1936 he started
children's art classes at his Beaver Hall Square flat with Fritz
Brandtner and Marian Scott.
In October 1936 he left for Spain to organize Canadian
medical aid in the service of the Spanish Republicans and set
up the Mobile Blood Transfusion unit. In May 1937 he re-
turned to Canada to promote support for Spain.
In January 1938 Bethune went to China with a Canadian-
American aid unit. He served with the Eighth Route Army
against Japanese invaders and helped organize medical ser-
10
Introduction
vices. He died as the result of an infection and has been held
in highest esteem by the Chinese people ever since.
In this book Wendell MacLeod describes the family back-
ground of Norman Bethune on the paternal side, his medical
training and the medical world in Montreal as Bethune en-
tered it, his move from the Royal Victoria to Sacre-Coeur,
his marriages to and divorces from Frances Penney, his grow-
ing social awareness and his work with the Montreal health
group.
Libbie Park writes of Montreal in the Thirties, of the life
and activities of left-moving people in Montreal at that time,
of Norman Bethune as she knew him, how and where he
lived, his friends, her work with him in the health group and
what the group set out to do and did.
Stanley Ryerson, then teaching in Montreal and a leading
member of the Communist Party in Quebec, writes of poverty
and power in Montreal, the relationship of French-speaking
and English-speaking progressives on the Left, and Bethune's
joining and participation in the work of the Communist Party
before his departure for Spain.
Wendell MacLeod continued the work of the health
group in 1937-38 with others including Kay Dickson, Grant
Lathe, Francis McNaughton and Hy Shister. After service in
the Canadian Navy in World War II he took part in medical
group practice in Winnipeg, and later became dean of medi-
cine for a decade at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1962
he established and directed the secretariat of the Association
of Canadian Medical Colleges in Ottawa, participating dur-
ing the sixties in Canadian and overseas projects relating the
training of health personnel to the needs of societies in
different stages of social and economic development. In 1973
he visited China with a delegation from the Bethune Memo-
rial Committee (now the Bethune Foundation) of Montreal.
77
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Libbie Park (her name then was Rutherford) left Montreal
with her husband and two children in 1938. After a post-
graduate course in Public Health Nursing at the University
of Toronto, she served in Europe towards the end of World
War II with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration. In Canada she worked briefly with the Victo-
rian Order of Nurses in Toronto, and then as secretary to the
Health Division of the Toronto Welfare Council. Divorced
and remarried in 1948, she became national secretary of the
Congress of Canadian Women and later secretary of the To-
ronto Peace Council. She is the joint author with her husband
Frank Park of The Anatomy of Big Business.
Stanley Ryerson was actively engaged in the Canadian
Communist movement for more than thirty-five years (until
1969). He served on the party's Central Committee from 1935
on, as its Quebec secretary (1936-1940), and later as educa-
tion director and organizational secretary of the Labour-
Progressive party. He edited National Affairs Monthly and, in
the 1960s, The Marxist Quarterly. His published works in Eng-
lish include 1837, the Birth of Canadian Democracy (1937),
French Canada (1943), A World to Win (1946), The Founding of
Canada, Beginnings to 1815 (i960), The Open Society (1965)
and Unequal Union (1968). At present he is teaching history at
PUniversite du Quebec a Montreal.
When Bethune died in China on November 12, 1939, his
name and story must have been well known to a large number
of Canadians who had supported the Committee to Aid Span-
ish Democracy and had made donations for his mobile blood
transfusion service in Spain or had read reports of its success.
During his fund-raising tour of Canada and parts of the
United States on his return from Spain in the summer of 1937
12
Introduction
some 30,000 Canadians from Atlantic to Pacific heard him
speak about the struggle there and the threat to world peace
should the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini win in
Spain. Many more heard of his work in China at the time
through the publicity of the Canadian League for Peace and
Democracy.
World War II had already begun when a memorial meet-
ing for Bethune was held in Montreal at Windsor Hall on
December 20 1939. Wendell MacLeod acted as chairman and
about one hundred friends and admirers of Bethune at-
tended.
The Consul-General of China in Canada, representing
the government of Chiang Kai-shek, then uniting all Chinese
in the struggle against Japanese aggression, praised Bethune's
contribution to the Chinese people's struggle. Dr. Francis
McNaughton described the work of the Montreal Group for
the Security of the People's Health, A.A. MacLeod of the
League for Peace and Democracy spoke of Bethune's work in
Spain and China, Hazen Sise of work in Spain; a letter was
read from Stanley Ryerson on behalf of the Communist Party
of Canada; other greetings were received.
On the same day (it was December 21 in China), Mao
Tse-tung published his famous essay "In Memory of Norman
Bethune" in which he writes: "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 warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people.
Every Communist must learn from him."
Here in this book we attempt to place Norman Bethune
—the complex, outspoken man we knew professionally, so-
cially, politically—in the Montreal of the Thirties where we
all lived and worked.
In a song by the young W.H. Auden, a favourite poet of
13
Bethune: The Montreal Years
the Left in the Thirties, there are two lines that sum up Be-
thune's attitude to life:
"Act from thought should quickly follow:
What is thinking for?"
For Norman Bethune, as the reader will see, thought led
always to action—planned, determined, passionate action—
joining with others, whether at home or abroad, to change
intolerable conditions.
J. W.M.
L.C.P.
S.B.R.
14
PART ONE
Dr. Norman Bethune
Wendell MacLeod
Predestination
From early boyhood Henry Norman Bethune expected to be-
come a great surgeon, to be a member of the profession
chosen by his grandfather Norman Bethune, whose brass
plate was on the young lad's door. There is a story that as a
child Bethune asked his parents to stop calling him Henry,
after his mother's father. He wanted to be called Norman,
after the doctor. Moreover, a family tradition, of which young
Norman was proud, held that among their many medical an-
cestors in the Hebrides one was physician to the "Lord of the
Isles".
Yet medicine, or more specifically surgery, was not the
only element in Bethune's youth with which he appears to
have identified strongly. There were others that merit recog-
nition. They form a cluster of continuing threads that run
through his whole life, making for a variety of reactions,
sometimes with shifts in direction, as he encountered chang-
ing circumstances and responded to new experiences. If one
wishes to understand him, to gain a glimpse of how life and
the world may have appeared to him at different times, then it
is necessary to look upon his complexity as dynamic, involv-
ing the play of forces that are to a degree discernable.
By the time Norman Bethune had finished secondary
school at the age of seventeen he had spent ten of his years in
Ontario communities that still bore some of the features of
77
Bethune: The Montreal Years
frontier life. In addition, he had spent several summer vaca-
tions in Gravenhurst in the Muskoka Lakes region where he
was born in 1890. This town of logs, lumber and steamships,
sometimes called the Sawdust City, probably loomed large in
shaping the interests and style of the lad. It was there on the
lake that he and his younger brother Malcolm learned and
enjoyed the dangerous game of "riding the logs" which
awaited trimming in the town's seventeen sawmills before be-
ing shipped south. There they roamed the woods, collected
butterflies and revelled in the outdoor life.
Other small Ontario communities in which he lived in-
cluded Beaverton, Blind River, (across the North Channel
from Manitoulin in Lake Huron), Sault Ste. Marie and Owen
Sound, the latter a busy port on Georgian Bay at the root of
the Bruce Peninsula. All were towns with a distinctly North-
ern flavour where lumbering and shipping were primary in-
dustries and where lumberjacks and sailors added their spe-
cial colour and zest to the scene. With exposure to all the
fascinations of the steamboats and the men who worked on
them it was natural that on later vacations Norman would
have jobs as a waiter on the Toronto-Kingston passenger run
of the Canada Steamship Lines and on the Upper Lakes ships
that plied between Owen Sound and Port Arthur.
In 1909, he was a rural schoolteacher for six months. Two
other years, from fall to break-up in the spring, he spent in
lumber camps in the woods. One year immediately after
finishing high school, he worked in the Algoma region north
of Lake Superior. In 1911, after completing his two prepara-
tory years at the University of Toronto before starting medi-
cine, he obtained an appointment as labourer-teacher for
Frontier College at a camp in the woods between Georgian
Bay and the mining town of Sudbury. He and the other men
spent their days at work in the bush; in the evenings he held
18
Dr. Norman Bethune
classes or tutorials in English and the "Three R's". For those
who were interested he encouraged singing and games. The
files of Frontier College in Toronto include a letter from the
young lumberjack-teacher asking for a supply of magazines,
Bibles and a dozen hymn books. The next year, he asked
Frontier for a similar assignment with a construction or rail-
way maintenance gang but it could not be arranged.
In the early years of this century the isolated men of the
woods differed more than now from urban, middle-class Ca-
nadians in respect to language, manners, recreation, modes of
settling disputes and general lifestyle. Nearly every camp had
its champions in fighting with bare knuckles, in proving mus-
cular strength and endurance, in exploits with women (where
there was opportunity) and in drinking. Taking "a shot" or a
dozen, was a Saturday night ceremonial—it relieved the
boredom of isolation, was a symbol of conviviality and to
some extent counter-balanced the rugged individualism that
was to be tempered later by the advent of trades unions. Beth-
une would always identify with the North country and the
ways of its people. He talked again and again about the Cana-
dian Shield, that massive crescent of Precambrian rock, lakes,
woods and muskeg making up much of our North.
Norman's globe-trotting father was Malcolm Nicholson
Bethune (1857-1932). Born in Toronto, Malcolm moved in
late infancy with his family to Edinburgh. They returned to
Toronto when he was twelve. About three years later, his
mother died and the children were sent back to Scotland to be
cared for by an aunt. At the age of twenty-three, after a pe-
riod in the wholesale fur trade, he boarded a ship to circle the
world, left it in Australia where he made a futile attempt at
sheep farming, then moved on to Hawaii where he hoped to
make a fortune growing oranges. There, it is said, he fell
under the spell of Elizabeth Ann Goodwin, a young English
19
Bethune: The Montreal Years
missionary who converted him to her way of life. This led him
back to Toronto to study theology at Knox College and even-
tually, to matrimony. Their life together was dedicated to be-
ing part of a great movement that extended into this century
under the slogan, "The Evangelization of the World in This
Generation." It had a deeply spiritual and altruistic char-
acter, with much compassion for the unfortunate. The Rever-
end Malcolm Bethune was warm, generous, hot-headed and
perhaps prejudiced against those who gained the wealth that
he had renounced. Unlike many Presbyterian ministers he
moved every few years, usually to small communities, which
meant that the children's roots were not deep in any one
place. Norman, perhaps partly for this reason, was something
of a loner.
The mother saw to it that their children carried gifts to
the poor or sick. At the same time she established standards of
nicety and refinement, as in music and reading, that set the
family off from many of their neighbours in frontier commu-
nities. She insisted on making more than one voyage to Eng-
land so that the children met not only her own family but also
some of the Bethune relatives, the Patersons and later, the
Scottish Nicolsons. Norman's surgeon-grandfather, men-
tioned earlier, had married Janet Nicolson. These contacts,
which continued when Norman was in surgical training in
London after the First World War, exposed him to examples
of gracious, even elegant living that he had not known much
of before.
Norman was brought up as Presbyterian. His father was a
Presbyterian minister as was his great-great grandfather. Pres-
byterianism involves a particular kind of church government,
but for many years its most prominent doctrinal feature was
predestination, meaning roughly that we live out our lives as
the Lord determines. Some room was left for the exercise of
20
Dr. Norman Bethune
free will in that one could choose to serve the Lord, Caesar or
Mammon and be rewarded accordingly, or take a chance. Yet
the doctrine could also be exploited by declining responsibil-
ity for actions. One could take personal credit for successes,
but blame destiny for misfortunes or even misconduct. Nor-
man had something of this sense of predestination about his
own life. "I am persuaded there is something fatal and
doomed and predestined about myself he wrote to a friend at
the end of August 1935.
Norman felt considerable resentment towards his father
Malcolm. Some of the latter's standards damaged the strong
bond of affection between them. Norman later spoke of his
"love-hate" relationship with his father. Another cause of fric-
tion arose from Norman's impression that his father drank
considerably when in Australia in his twenties, but then pi-
ously prohibited alcohol in his own home. Again, in his retire-
ment he gambled, unsuccessfully, on the stock market. Nor-
man found these inconsistencies to be hypocritical. Such ex-
periences also probably strengthened a natural reaction to the
formidable thriftiness imposed by the parents on their chil-
dren, sometimes with great severity.
Norman's Bethune ancestors arrived in North America when
his great-great-grandfather, Reverend John Bethune
(1750-1815), emigrated from Skye to North Carolina. Rever-
end Bethune was imprisoned after his regiment, The Royal
Highland Emigrants, of which he was chaplain, had been de-
feated in the American War of Independence. Upon being
released, he moved to Montreal and organized the first Pres-
byterian congregation in Montreal.
Family archives reported that John Bethune was married
in New York in 1782 to Veronica Wadden, daughter of a
Swiss professor at the University of Geneva, from Berne. But
21
Bethune: The Montreal Years
recent research by Mary Larratt Smith and Hilary Russell
has established as fact that the marriage took place in Mont-
real on the same date by a Church of England clergyman.
The baptismal certificate of Veronica, actually Veronique,
was found in Notre Dame Church, Montreal and her parents'
marriage took place in the parish church at St. Laurent. Her
father, Jean Etienne Waddin (or Wadden or Waddens) was
indeed Swiss but he had lived in Montreal from the mid-
17608, became a fur trader and participated in founding the
North West Company. Her mother was probably Marie-Jos-
eph DeGuire whose antecedents, including also the names of
Bernard, Colin, Cousineau and Coutu, went back in Canada
to the early 1600s.
Norman's great-grandfather Angus was born in 1783, the
eldest of Reverend John Bethune's six sons and three
daughters. Angus lived from the age of four in a homestead
on land the family cleared at what is now Williamstown,
Glengarry, under conditions described, according to Smith,
as "poverty and privations incidental to 'life in the bush'."
Reverend John Bethune was probably acquainted then
with explorers and fur traders including Alexander Macken-
zie, Alexander Henry and David Thompson, as well as his
father-in-law Wadden, so it was natural that by age twenty-
one Angus should be an employee of the North West Com-
pany in the Red River area of Manitoba. For most of his life
he was to be associated with the fur trade and the West. Be-
tween 1814 and 1816, extraordinary as it now seems, Angus
made two trips to China on behalf of his company.
Angus rose to prominence in the North West Company,
becoming a partner at thirty, and an influential person in the
Hudson's Bay Company after the merger of the two compa-
nies, but he was regarded as short-tempered and difficult in
his relationships with people. Physical hardship, intrigue and
22
Dr. Norman Bethune
feuding were part of the trader's life, but so were the compan-
ionship and ministrations of the Indian women. One of these
was Angus's wife, Louisa Mackenzie, who was the mother of
six of his children, including Norman, the grandfather of our
Norman. Whether or not Louisa was the daughter of fur
trader Roderick McKenzie and a native woman of the Atha-
basca country is uncertain. In any case, she was known to
some of the Bethunes as "Miss Green Blanket". Apparently
Norman was not aware of that part of his ancestry. He is not
known to have mentioned it to his friends in Montreal or
elsewhere. I am sure he would have been proud of the "im-
proved Scotch" connection, particularly after his intellectual
emancipation in his late Montreal period.
In 1832 Angus and Louisa moved with their six children
from Sault Ste. Marie to a trading post, Michipicoten on
Magpie River in the so-called Indian land north of Lake Su-
perior. A year later Louisa died, and a year after that Angus
sent his twelve-year-old second son, the "barely literate" Nor-
man, to his uncle, the Anglican rector in Cobourg, Alexander
Neil Bethune, for instruction. Six years later the boy entered
Upper Canada College.
This Norman Bethune finished at Upper Canada College
as head boy, attended King's College, studied medicine in
London and Edinburgh and returned to Toronto to practise.
In 1851, he helped establish the Upper Canada Journal of Medi-
cal, Surgical and Physical Science. The first paper published in
the first issue of the journal was written by him. It describes
an anatomical anomaly in a child from a "frontier town of
northern New York." With Dr. James Bovell, William Osier's
teacher, and others he was a founding member of the Medical
Faculty of Trinity College in Toronto. He resigned as its dean
during a squabble with Bishop Strachan and the Council of
Trinity College. The disagreement, which was protracted and
23
Bethune: The Montreal Years
complex, had to do with religious qualifications for admission
of students, payment of teachers, legal rights of Council and
Faculty and other issues. He became Professor of Anatomy in
1871 when a new faculty was organized, spending the inter-
vening decade and a half in Britain and on the Continent and
practising surgery in Edinburgh. He also found time to paint
a picture of a battle observed during the Franco-Austrian
War. In the Toronto Academy of Medicine there is a litho-
graph of his that depicts three skeletons playing billiards, us-
ing skulls as balls. The three figures were said to resemble
prominent medical contemporaries!
That was the glamorous side of our Norman's grand-
father. On the other side there were grief, loneliness and dete-
rioration, beginning with the death of his wife. For five years
his four children were cared for by relatives in Scotland, then
he brought the two boys back to Canada, one of whom was
Malcolm. He became careless with money, squandered his
inheritance from Angus and became a problem drinker. The
last two years of his life he spent in Malcolm's home in Gra-
venhurst, dying in 1892 when young Norman was only two.
Less is known about Norman's ancestors on his mother's
side. His mother's father, Henry Goodwin, was an English
wood turner and his first Canadian grandson was thought to
have inherited his mechanical ingenuity. No other informa-
tion about him is at hand.
With respect to the traits that Norman Bethune may have
drawn from his father, his grandfather and his more remote
ancestors, biographer Roderick Stewart writes in The Mind of
Norman Bethune:
The most pronounced were evident from childhood: in-
telligence, ambition, artistic skills, stubbornness and un-
willingness to compromise against principles, regardless
24
Dr. Norman Bethune
of the consequences. This would be the source of both
his greatest agonies and his most magnificent achieve-
ments.
Perhaps if the record were more complete, especially concern-
ing his mother's side of the family, one would discover the
sources of other traits such as his generosity, compassion,
tenderness and enormous joie de vivre that were so real to
many who knew him.
Norman's own youth in frontier settings, his kinship with
the men of the North, his exposure to men of the cloth and
their Calvinism, and his early contact with some of the
refinements and sophistication of Old World culture, all en-
gendered a number of reflex styles, basic values and sources
of motivation, some of which were competitive if not mutually
antagonistic. In a letter written in 1935, Norman gave his
own interpretation of his heritage. He wrote: "My father was
an evangelist and I come of a race of men violent, unstable, of
passionate conviction and wrong-headedness, intolerant yet
with it all a vision of truth and a drive to carry them on to it
even though it leads, as it has done in my family, to their
destruction."
McGill and the Royal Vic
It was an exciting experience for me to begin at McGill Uni-
versity in 1922 the eight-year course in Arts and Medicine.
The medical world in Canada in the 1920s, like that of the
universities and other institutions and of most circles in the
community, reflected the transition from preoccupation with
the First World War to what was called post-war recovery.
This meant vastly different things to different people. Many
homes were still saddened by the absence of lost husbands
25
Bethune: The Montreal Years
and sons. Some of the veterans had trouble "settling down".
Industry was shifting from munitions and other war materials
to the neglected supply of civilian consumer goods. There was
increased public awareness of the wartime progress in science
and its potential for improving the condition of people; in
fact, over-confidence in what science could do alone, because
a majority of scientists, the business world and politicians did
not concern themselves with the problem of how the benefits
of scientific and technological advance could be distributed
fairly in the population. In medicine there was the beginning
of a revolution in medical practice and professional training
as advances in the fundamental sciences began to challenge
traditional attitudes and techniques in hospitals and doctors'
offices.
For most people the mood was one of "getting back to
normal." Others were experiencing an enormous elation. Still
others were cynical or disillusioned about the results of a war
waged supposedly "to make the world safe for democracy."
There were still glaring class-differences in the access of
people to the good things of life, U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson and the other peacemakers at Versailles had talked a
lot about the right to self-determination, but now the office or
the factory was seen to have the same kind of regimentation
that one had come to despise in the armed services. The feel-
ings of veterans were being described in novels, poetry and
films. There was the desire to forget the muddy trenches, the
ubiquitous horse dung, the stinking ships, the tedious bureau-
cracy, the sarcastic bastard above you and the boredom of
just waiting for the alarm or for the watch to end. Relief was
sought in many ways: by revelling in the good things of life,
by turning to sports or the radio that had just become avail-
able; by seeking creative self-expression in music, art or writ-
26
Dr. Norman Bethune
ing or in romantic adventure. For some it was to dream of and
to work towards a new society.
These forms of expression were particularly visible in the
university. In the Faculty of Arts at McGill throughout the
twenties the lecturers in mathematics were mostly ex-officers
of the Royal Navy, the tutors in English were often ex-gun-
ners in the artillery, and the physics professors were returning
from their stint of research on anti-submarine and other de-
vices. Wartime experience came up frequently in lectures.
Veterans were often elected to major posts in the student soci-
eties. For freshmen in 1922 a particularly glamorous veteran
was President of the McGill Students' Society Errol Amaron,
son of a French Huguenot clergyman, a star in football and
other sports, a tutor in English composition. To the surprise of
many he dropped his g's, used soldiers' slang and was regis-
tered to study theology. He later became principal of Stan-
stead College in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Medicine
'24 was called the soldier class.
This was the decade of the flowering of a whole crop of
McGill student poets, such as F.R. Scott, soon to become a
key figure in the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), la-
ter national chairman of the Co-operative Commonwealth
Federation (CCF) and the foe of the infamous Padlock Law of
Maurice Duplessis. A.J.M. (Art) Smith was another. Smith
moved for his final year from a major in Chemistry to Hon-
ours in English and was deep into his critical study of the
Irish poet W.B. Yeats and publishing his verse in the McGill
Daily's Literary Supplement. Later, a poet in his own right, at
Michigan State University he would become the definitive
anthologist of Canadian verse. In 1925 these two student po-
ets with Leo Edel founded the McGill Fortnightly Review, each
issue of which was awaited eagerly by many readers. One of
27
Bethune: The Montreal Years
the top debators was Eugene Forsey, protege of Stephen
Leacock and active in the Conservative Club before going to
Oxford for his great enlightenment. Other politically active
contemporaries were Alan MacNaughton, a Liberal, later
Speaker of the House of Commons and Senator, and Phillip
Mathams, an electrician member of the Independent Labour
Party in Britain before coming to McGill to study theology
and set up the McGill Labour Club in 1924.
This feast of intellectual interest was shared less fully by
engineering, dental and medical students, partly because of
their full timetables. They had good representation, however,
in some other activities. One of these was the First National
Conference of Canadian Students held in Toronto after
Christmas, 1922, to debate national and world issues. Stirring
pleas on behalf of the underpaid miners and farmers of Nova
Scotia were made by students Larry (Norman) MacKenzie,
later president of the universities of New Brunswick and Brit-
ish Columbia and Claude Richardson, then from Cape Bre-
ton and later a Montreal lawyer. A series of conferences held
each September from 1921 at Elgin House, Muskoka, under
the auspices of the Student Christian Movement (SCM), at-
tracted students from all faculties. In 1922 several very articu-
late leaders in social reform and its relevance to religious
thinking stimulated lively discussion, including J.S. Woods-
worth, later to become leader of the new CCF party, Rever-
end Salem Bland and Dr. Ernest Thomas. Prominent older
students included the Torontonians James Endicott (reared in
China) and Davidson Ketchum (a prisoner for most of the
First World War in Germany where he made the observations
on prison camp society later published as Ruhleben); Sandy
(A.M.) Nicholson, later member of parliament for MacKen-
zie-Hudson Bay and still later Minister of Social Welfare in
the Douglas government in Saskatchewan, and finally, the en-
28
Dr. Norman Bethune
ergetic Bob McClure, entering his final year of medicine in
preparation for distinguished roles in China and later in In-
dia and in his home country.
Under the leadership of its national secretary, Ernest H.
Clark, the SCM programmes in conferences and study
groups sensitized many students to the inequities and injus-
tices within Canadian society and between nations. The
search was for valid principles of personal, institutional and
international conduct. For many the context was the Chris-
tian heritage, but with much of the traditional dogma over-
looked in favour of study of the historical Jesus. At the same
time some were examining seriously Tawney's The Acquisitive
Society and later, John MacMurray's Christianity and Commun-
ism. This was the era also of vibrant, prophetic, intellectually
strong preachers in some of the churches. In Montreal, for
instance, during most of the twenties the American Presbyte-
rian Church on Dorchester Street was comfortably filled on
Sunday evenings, occasionally packed, to hear the Welshman
Richard Roberts or the American Lynn Harold Hough.
To move from this lively, socially concerned atmosphere,
which included much diversion and fun, into the medical
world, especially its hospitals, was like entering another coun-
try, excitingly interesting, but very, very different. It is a mis-
take to think of the medical "world" as a homogeneous sys-
tem or as made up of component parts that are coordinated,
communicating and motivated in anything like a uniform
manner. Medical Montreal, in 1928, was made up of a num-
ber of circles that had little overlap with one another. There
was the English-French dichotomy. There was the distance, in
more than the geographic sense, between McGilPs two main
teaching hospitals, Montreal General Hospital and the Royal
Victoria Hospital, where I first encountered Norman Bethune
when he was assistant to the Professor of Surgery and I was a
29
Bethune: The Montreal Years
McGill graduate interning in the Department of Medicine.
Within each of these hospitals, but especially at the Royal
Vic, a gap existed between the specialists and the smaller
number of general practitioners. The general practitioners
were attached to the outpatient department, receiving in re-
turn the right to admit their patients to the private pavilion,
although not necessarily under their own names. There was
the rank barrier too, between the head of the service and the
assistants; and an interprofessional one between doctors and
nurses. Newcomers to the Royal Vic often felt a social
stratification; doctors socially well connected by birth or mar-
riage seeming to get a subtle recognition that was not neces-
sarily matched by other considerations.
I can recall only three doctors on the permanent "indoor"
staff at the Royal Vic in 1930 who were Jewish, and two of
these were brothers. In my graduating class of '21 at the
nearby Montreal High School, however, twenty-one out of
thirty-two students in the academic "Latin stream" had been
of that faith.
In the hospitals during this period there were two schools
of thought which were often in disagreement although sel-
dom in open conflict. These were "traditional doctors of the
old school", usually competent in the art of medicine and well
grounded in the standard clinical principles and methods,
and the "new scientists". The latter, usually medical gradu-
ates, had pursued in depth one or more of the basic medical
sciences, such as bacteriology, biochemistry, pharmacology,
or physiology, usually as applied to the new understanding of
the basic mechanisms in health and disease. They were famil-
iar with laboratory technology and understood the principles
of research design and of evaluation of their experimental
results. Some of these were also well grounded in clinical
medicine or surgery and knew how to relate to their patients.
30
Dr. Norman Bethune
Others with less clinical experience generally knew their limi-
tations and could be effective in a team setting. Both types
were present, for instance, in J.S.L. Browne's well-integrated
research team in endocrinology.
Where team conditions did not exist and the medical sci-
entist lacked clinical experience or aptitude, then there were
obvious hazards to the goal of personalized, comprehensive
care of the patient. The danger of a too-rapid expansion of
research-oriented medicine was foreseen by one wing of the
staff, whereas the other wing, a minority but influential,
stressed the urgent need to place medical practice on a more
solid scientific footing. This dichotomy worked against efforts
to foster a sense of unity among the staff of a department or of
the hospital as a whole.
The Royal Vic itself was a powerful and important institu-
tion in English-speaking Montreal. The prime reason for
planning the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1887 had been seri-
ous overcrowding at the Montreal General Hospital.
Founded in a new building in 1821, the Montreal General
was intended for "service to the sick and the teaching of medi-
cine." Eventually it proved too small for the demands made
on it. Patients often had to sleep on the floor in the male
wards. If they had typhoid fever, they were put in tents on the
grounds. To most English-speaking Montrealers (the French
Canadians had Hotel Dieu and Notre-Dame Hospital) the
logical step to deal with this problem was to enlarge "The
General" and build a hospital for convalescents. Argument
about the location of the latter and the depression of the
1880s delayed action. Then one day in April, 1887, the news-
papers announced the donation of one million dollars to erect
and maintain a hospital if the city would provide the land.
The donors were George Stephen and Donald Smith of the
Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate. They proposed the
31
Bethune: The Montreal Years
name, Royal Victoria Hospital, to commemorate the Queen's
Golden Jubilee. Negotiations about union with the General
fell through and the Governors of the Royal Victoria Hospi-
tal went ahead on their own and on December 2, 1893 the
turreted structure in Scottish Baronial style located on the
mountain side was opened, providing the city with 265 new
hospital beds.
The charter of the RVH contained some significant
clauses. Seven of the fifteen Governors were ex officio appoint-
ments: the presidents of the Board of Trade, CPR, Bank of
Montreal, the Mayor of Montreal, the Principal and the Dean
of Medicine, McGill University. Vacancies on the hospital
board were to be filled by "persons professing some form of
the Protestant religion." There were financial qualifications as
well, a quite common arrangement. The hospital was given
power to establish "convalescent cottage hospitals, as
branches thereof, at Banff and in the North-West Territories,
and at Caledonia Springs," near Ottawa. The explanation of
this is probably that the CPR's competition, the Grand
Trunk Railway, operated several health spas. In the twenties
and thirties we often spoke of "the three powerful interlock-
ing directorates—the CPR, the Bank of Montreal and
RVH."
Women could participate in auxiliary services at the
RVH but were limited otherwise. Even in the early 1960s the
Board was spoken of as "for Protestant gentlemen." The de-
gree in Arts at McGill was awarded to women in 1890, but
not until 1922 did Dr. Jessie Boyd Scriver become the first
wornan intern in Medicine. However, she slept at home and
received her meals in the nurses' dining room. The next
woman intern was my classmate, Dorothea Mellor, class of
1930. When one of our colleagues at RVH became ill Doro-
thea was asked to take over his ward patients which meant
32
Dr. Norman Bethune
that she would have to assume night duties. So, she was given
the room reserved for alcoholics in the private pavilion next
to the physiotherapy department. She had to be moved later
to one of the private rooms because, as the hospital's historian
D. Sclater Lewis later said, in the aftermath of the stockmar-
ket crash in October 1929 there were so many alcoholics in
delirium tremens that they could not spare her the room.
Women physicians were admitted to the Doctors' Dining
Room only in 1942 and to regular quarters in 1962.
There were other examples of lag in the adaptation of
hospitals to the swell of democratic sensitivity and the move-
ment for reform which followed the First World War. As stu-
dents and interns at the Royal Vic in 1929-32 some of us were
disturbed by the many infringements on human dignity that
were institutionalized in the way the hospital functioned.
There were for instance great discrepancies in many aspects
of patient care between the public wards and the private
rooms. We were upset about the low salaries and miserable
conditions under which the Irish and Scottish immigrant
maids lived in garret-like rooms under the hospital roof,
where we saw them for their sore throats and other com-
plaints when the admitting officer was off duty. And there
were the imperious manners and caustic tempers of some of
the staff in their treatment of orderlies, public ward patients
and sometimes students. At a theatre clinic for students in the
out-patient department in 1928, for example, a senior physi-
cian was interrogating a Chinese dishwasher with leukemia.
When the patient, who knew little English, made no reply,
the teacher raised his voice, and finally bellowed at him. The
man cowered in fear. Many of us were incensed. In the mar-
gin of my notebook I wrote: Just like the British gunboat in
the Yangtse.
Later, a fellow intern, Jim Quintin, promoted a five-year
33
Bethune: The Montreal Years
plan for reform under the slogan, Is the hospital for the pa-
tient, or the patient for the hospital? We all supplied him with
items for it. And there was Lewis Johnston from Edinburgh.
He valiantly rejected a long-standing tradition at the Royal
Vic. Johnston refused to serve as a porter with the chauffeur
at the other end of the stretcher when private patients were
taken home from the Ross Pavilion by ambulance but were
well enough not to require the presence of a doctor during the
trip.
In 1928, the year of Bethune's arrival in Montreal, an ac-
tive clinical and research programme in neurosurgery and
neurology had been set up at the Royal Victoria under its
new Physician-in-Chief, Dr. Jonathan Meakins. Emphasis
was placed on the joint collaboration of surgeons, physicians
and laboratory scientists in studying the problems in a par-
ticular body region such as the nervous system. Dr. Meakins
called this approach "regional medicine" when he formed the
Medical-Surgical Pulmonary Clinic with Dr. Archibald. Be-
thune became a member of this group.
Bethune in the Twenties
When Henry Norman Bethune arrived in Montreal in 1928,
he had already packed a wide assortment of life experiences
into his thirty-eight years. Bethune, halfway through his
medical course, joined the Canadian army in August, 1914,
was in France within five months as a stretcher bearer, and in
another two was wounded in the terrible Second Battle of
Ypres in which one out of every three Canadians was killed or
put out of action. What the effect of this was on Norman is
not recorded, but it must have been a disturbing experience.
After being found unfit for full duty he was discharged ("mili-
34
Dr. Norman Bethune
tary character exemplary") to resume his medical studies in
the wartime accelerated course at the University of Toronto.
He did not have an internship but obtained further clinical
experience by relieving two doctors for several months in
Stratford, Ontario. He spent the remainder of the war as a
junior medical officer, Surgeon Lieutenant, in the Royal
Navy. His record states that "he had taken great interest in
the general welfare of officers and men, also in the study of
medical conditions as they affect the R.N."
Following demobilization from the British Navy in 1919,
he went for additional surgical training in London and fur-
ther study in Edinburgh. After passing the examinations of
the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh) on first trial he
returned to the West London Hospital as resident surgical
officer. During that appointment he took time off for 420
hours of anatomical dissection at the Middlesex Hospital
Medical School. Anatomical knowledge is essential to good
technique in the operating room, but at that time the field was
intellectually rather static. Instead, scientifically oriented
graduate students were clustering around the laboratories
and wards of investigators using the methods of biochemistry
and physiology to investigate clinical shock, the nature of
blood clotting, the subtle mechanisms in circulation, respira-
tion and metabolism.
With his background, Bethune was inadequately pre-
pared for the role of clinical scientist in the integrated surgical
team of the German type of university medical centre that
had been developing in several American cities and was about
to begin in Canada. His hospital experience was that of a
practical surgeon with considerable exposure to most
branches of surgery. His competence included the character-
istics that were particularly well developed in British general
35
Bethune: The Montreal Years
hospitals of the period: the ability to make quick decisions, to
operate speedily and to be versatile and innovative under con-
ditions often far from luxurious. As a result he was ideally
prepared for the role of military surgeon under the challeng-
ing conditions of guerrilla warfare.
Meanwhile, Norman had come to idolize an extremely
attractive, well-to-do and very properly brought up young
Edinburgh woman, Frances Campbell Penny. They had post-
poned marriage until late August, 1923, when he had com-
pleted his training and, by good fortune, she had come into a
modest legacy from an uncle. Then for nearly five months
they had an exciting tour of Europe—surgical clinics in Paris
and Vienna, skiing in Switzerland and art galleries all over
the Continent. Despite serious personality clashes and ex-
haustion of resources the marriage survived the travel.
When Norman brought his bride to Canada in 1924 one
of the first towns they looked at as a possible location for his
practice was the new development at Rouyn in the Noranda
mining district of Northern Quebec. He realized at once that
Frances would wither in such a setting and they moved on.
During his 1937 speaking tour between Spain and China,
four years after their second divorce, a letter about a vacation
for her with his sister and enclosing a railway ticket, had this
postscript: "Do you remember Rouyn in 1923? [it was 1924.]
It is now a mining town—not of three buildings—but of
20,000 people. We could have been wealthy, but oh what a
life of poverty." Kindly, but wistful? Instead of Rouyn, they
went to Detroit and in less than two years Norman was climb-
ing the professional ladder rapidly, with the prospect of popu-
larity, wealth and acceptance by his peers. But soon he con-
cluded that this life was tawdry, and even destructive.
Frances was dainty and beautiful, a decade younger than
her dashing husband. She had the gloss of the British and
36
Dr. Norman Bethune
continental "finishing schools" which often fascinated
rugged, "unfinished colonials", as she called them. To Nor-
man she was a gem of grace and elegance. To some in Detroit
and Montreal she appeared shallow, naive, humourless and
vindictive. To her husband, later, her conduct seemed
undignified. He may have had feelings of insecurity for which
generally he compensated robustly, often to the discomfort of
others, particularly his wife. Her deep insecurity, however,
outside the narrow milieu of her sex and class in Victorian
Edinburgh had no such compensating props. The stage was
set for friction and disaster.
Frances left Norman in 1926 and a divorce followed
shortly. The marriage was an unusual one. In important ways
it was an incompatible relationship. Yet despite remarriage,
followed by a second divorce and later disillusionment and
exasperation with Frances, Norman continued to have an ex-
traordinary affection for her. Along with the collapse of his
marriage, Norman also became severely disenchanted with
his lifelong goal to rise to fame as a dazzling, successful sur-
geon. His experience with the medical world in Detroit had
made that goal seem hollow.
His health collapsed soon after his marriage fell apart. In
1926 he entered the Trudeau Sanatorium in the Adirondack
Mountains in New York State with moderately advanced tu-
berculosis of the lungs. It was a much dreaded disease. In the
period 1917-1929 for example, one person in five entering
sanatoria in the province of Saskatchewan died during their
first and only admission, and in Quebec it was worse. With
barely 27 percent of the Canadian population in 1928, that
province had 40 percent of the deaths.
Bethune's depression and disillusionment were revealed
in the murals he painted at the sanatorium, in 1927 depicting
his own life in allegory. They show him embarking on a voy-
37
Bethune: The Montreal Years
age across the Sea of Adolescence in a galleon—"Youth at
the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm". Nearing a rocky coast
the tempting Sirens—Fame, Wealth, Love and Art—direct
him towards the Castle of Heart's Desire. Later, attacked by
tuberculosis in the form of bat-like creatures and hurtling
down the Abyss of Despair, he sees that "the Castle of Heart's
Desire, which once looked so magnificently substantial from
the front, is actually only a Hollywood set." The final panel
includes tombstones with the names and suggested dates of
death of Bethune (1932) and his four cottage colleagues. One
of these was Alfred Blalock, pioneer in open-heart surgery for
congenital heart disease.
As Bethune recovered, in good measure because of his
insistence on pneumothorax treatment in lieu of lengthy rest,
he pledged himself to master and apply the new field of pul-
monary surgery to lengthen the lives of the victims of tuber-
culosis; a good example, no doubt of the usual inseparability
of altruism and self-expression. He had been stimulated by a
recent monograph on collapse therapy of pulmonary tubercu-
losis by University of Michigan thoracic surgeon John Alex-
ander. Montreal was closer than Ann Arbor and Dr. Edward
Archibald at the Royal Victoria Hospital already had an in-
ternational reputation. When he applied to Archibald for a
training post the senior surgeon was interested but further
negotiation would be conditional on Bethune's spending first
some months in laboratory work with scientists at Ray Brook
in New York State. Archibald suggested that he look into
work being done there on pulmonary infection by David T.
Smith and J.L. Wilson. Ray Brook was a state hospital, also in
the Adirondack Mountains, with a strong research wing. Be-
thune accepted gladly and according to Dr. Smith, it was a
good effort. Writing to Rod Stewart four decades later he said
".. . (Bethune) learned more (in three months) about bacteri-
38
Dr. Norman Bethune
ology than most graduate students learn in three years!"
Upon completion of his studies, Bethune was accepted at the
Royal Victoria and moved to Montreal.
A Different Kind of Surgeon
I recall clearly the first occasion I caught sight of Norman
Bethune. On a Sunday morning, while I was still a student, I
passed on the McGill campus near the Roddick Gates the
dashing surgeon with beret and colourful scarf, accompanied
by his stylish and very good-loking wife—the only time I saw
Frances. They had been re-married in November 1929, and
this encounter was in the winter or early spring of 1930.
Later I worked on the wards and in clinics at the Royal
Vic when I was an intern on the medical (as distinct from
surgical) side from June 1930 and the medical resident from
July 1931 for a year. At the Vic Bethune made an impressive
impact on every intern serving on either the male or female
medical ward when he came in response to a request for a
surgical consultation on a pulmonary problem. For a patient
with moderately or even far advanced tuberculosis the ques-
tion was usually should surgical operation be considered?
Sometimes the diagnosis was still questionable, the search be-
ing negative for tubercle bacilli in the sputum or in a collec-
tion of fluid in the pleural space between the lung and the
chest wall. Bethune's insistence on a wider or more intensive
search provided the answer more than a few times. Once his
prodding led to the identification of a fungus, or mould. He
jumped at the opportunity to look into the literature on what
was then an unusual and often overlooked cause of pleurisy or
pulmonary infection, then discovered another case or two and
drafted a paper on the subject. For some reason this particu-
lar paper was not submitted for publication, probably be-
39
Bethune: The Montreal Years
cause in this instance he had added nothing new to the sub-
ject. But his excitement in making a discovery that widened
his own horizon was contagious and he made sure that we
shared in it.
On the medical wards in 1930-32 our interns and nurses
often commented on Bethune's warm and considerate man-
ner with patients who were under review for possible surgery,
serious surgery. Sitting on the edge of the bed once, forget-
ting about isolation technique in his absorption, he explained
what would be done at the operation, what the odds were for
improvement, for mere survival or for losing the bet—with
and without surgery. One time, when the odds were worse
than fifty-fifty, he patted the man on the knee, through the
bed clothes, saying something like: Think it over; I'll see you
tomorrow. Another time, suspecting indecisiveness due to cir-
cumstances in the home, he asked if he could meet the spouse
to explain what was at stake. This intensely personal concern
for the patient's welfare is what I and others remember most
clearly.
At the same time Norman could be irritated or angry if a
doctor, nurse or orderly did not do his duty. For example, in
assessing abscess of the lung it was useful to note the amount
of sputum coughed up in eight or twelve hour periods and
any changes in its character. Carelessness in observing and
reporting such details brought down his wrath on the culprit.
It was not the breaking of rule as such, because he enjoyed
breaking obsolete or ineffective rules, but rather the omission
of a duty that was important for the patient's recovery. Dr.
GJ. Wherrett, for over forty years devoted to the war against
tuberculosis in Canada, remembers Bethune telling him that
the patient with tuberculosis had a duty to take the surgeon's
advice. Others also remember his having been authoritarian
or even overbearing. My guess is that when he overstated the
40
Dr. Norman Bethune
case for the new treatment procedures it was a measure of his
own conviction concerning their life-saving value, and was
intended as a slap in the face of apathy, complacency or self-
righteous attitudes concerning outworn procedures. At Tru-
deau Norman had seen too much of the overly cautious, laissez-
faire physician. As a result, the more pompous the offender,
the more severe was likely to be his castigation. When trying
to overcome obstacles in order to complete an important task
he reverted to roles familiar to him from his youth—the boss
shouting orders to his timber crew, or the two-fisted tech-
nique of the foreman facing an obstreperous member of the
work gang.
When he was sent by Dr. Archibald to provide surgical
advice, to those of us on the medical wards Bethune was like a
breath of fresh air. He was informal, outgoing, dynamic in
speech and body movements, cheerful and sometimes even
gay. He seemed to stimulate in us quickly a sense of person-to-
person contact with him, a response he evoked also from the
patients he came to see on consultation. His gifts as a teacher
came out most strikingly in the first of several weekly tutorials
for the new interns in the department of medicine which were
my duty to organize when I became resident in July, 1931.
They were held on Mondays at one o'clock in the sideroom
off Ward D. With a spring in his step and jaunty manner
Bethune seated himself on the high stretcher on wheels and
prompted us to propose the topics for discussion. He was very
interested in how an issue or problem appeared to others, and
pursued this before expressing crisply and dramatically his
own view, which often was at variance with what was usually
practised or taught. For example, he ridiculed the too fre-
quent practice by the doctor of ordering "bed rest" for a
particularly sick patient, then allowing him to walk to the
bathroom at the other end of the thirty-bed ward. Rather, he
41
Bethune: The Montreal Years
asserted, if you mean strict bed rest then it means "bedpan
rest". If you mean "bed rest with bathroom privileges" write
the order that way. Say what you mean!
An example of his cutting through a clinical ritual that
had become perfunctory had to do with the examination of
the chest. The routine physical examination consisted of four
stages established by the time of the great French physician,
Laennec, a century and a quarter earlier. Never was the order
of the four stages to be changed, nor could one of them be
omitted. The first stage was inspection, observing the shape
and movement of the chest. Stage two was palpitation, plac-
ing the hands on the chest to detect lags in movement or
variations in the transmission of the spoken voice, as when the
patient said "ninety-nine". Third was percussion, tapping
with the finger to detect changes in the pitch or resistance
which might indicate alterations in the tissues underneath.
And finally, auscultation, listening with a stethoscope or with
the ear resting on the chest wall. This ritual was required and
its findings recorded in the above order, whether the chest
belonged to a sick patient in hospital or to a robust workman
about to seek an operation on his piles. Occasionally, we de-
parted from orthodoxy and wrote "N.N." (not notable) after
each of the four headings, or even abbreviated further by
scribbling "Chest-normal"; but in the teaching hospital set-
ting, especially on the medical wards, this was frowned upon.
To the above orthodoxy, which we had all learned thor-
oughly, Bethune applied the cost-benefit principle long be-
fore the term came into use. How often do you learn anything
from palpitation and percussion in routine examination, he
asked. How often do heart and lung specialists disagree on
what they percuss, or hear through the stethoscope? How
often, in fact, do we discover early tuberculosis by physical
examination? One could quibble on each of these points be-
42
Dr. Norman Bethune
cause each technique had a place, but the questions were
provocative, made us critical and were honest. Then he would
emphasize his lesson with pithy, memorable dogma of his
own: the only physical sign worth a good goddamn in the
diagnosis of early TB is the post-tussive sub-crepitant rale at
the apex (in other words, a delicate clicking sound heard at
the top of the chest during deep inspiration after a cough).
But the X ray was the only reliable path to early diagnosis,
followed by the search for tubercle bacilli. Then he would
elaborate on each of these approaches. There was such an
enthusiastic reception at the first tutorial that the schedule
was altered to have him return on at least two more occasions.
His energetic pursuit of new techniques or approaches
was refreshing to young doctors who had just completed from
six to eight years of what many considered excessively formal
and regimented study in pre-medical and medical courses.
One very minor innovation impressed us because the idea was
obviously so useful and simple, yet no one had taken the
trouble to implement it, at least in our medical centre. This
was his use of a sticker containing in red two outlines of the
chest and ribs, front and back. This permitted the examiner
to record diagramatically the exact findings and extent of
involvement of the underlying lung and insert it in the pa-
tient's case record. Changes in the condition could be seen at
a glance by looking at the series of findings recorded at suc-
cessive examinations. Bethune saw to it that a pad of stickers
was available on the intern's desk on the medical and surgical
wards and the chiefs of those services, Meakins and Archi-
bald, encouraged their use. Some of the doctors then had'rub-
ber stamps made for the same purpose to use in their offices.
This is the kind of simple innovation that can be made sponta-
neously and simultaneously in a number of centres, when the
imagination is released. The same thing happens in every
43
Bethune: The Montreal Years
branch of science and technology, even at complex levels.
One can be independently original without necessarily being
first; and if second or third, not necessarily being a plagiarist.
In his work with patients who had TB, Bethune was a
strong advocate of collapse therapy, the simplest form of
which was called pneumothorax. He himself had received the
treatment at the Trudeau Sanatorium, and it had cured him.
Pneumothorax means the presence of air in the potential
space between the lung and the outer pleura, or lining, of the
chest wall. Normally the two surfaces are in close contact. Air
can rush into this space when the lung is ruptured, as in a bad
rib fracture, resulting in shortness of breath. An artificial
pneumothorax (AP) is created by inserting a hollow needle
between the ribs slowly until it penetrates the pleural lining.
Air then flows in because of the negative pressure holding the
lung snugly against the chest wall. The elastic tissue through-
out the lung, if it is healthy, causes it to shrink to a small
fraction of its normal volume. If the elastic tissue is considera-
bly destroyed as in advanced emphysema (due to you know
what!), the lung will collapse very little. Slight pressure on the
cylinder of the apparatus may create positive pressure and
further shrinkage. The effect of pneumothorax is to put the
lung at rest, increasing its blood supply and promoting heal-
ing. Very rarely was the air "pumped" in.
As occurs often in the history of discoveries, the idea of
putting air into the chest of consumptives arose about a cen-
tury before it began to catch on. With dubious logic, either
Gilchrist in Britain, or his translator Bourru in Paris in 1770
suggested AP because patients seemed to do so well in the
fresh air of sea voyages. A half-century later because, among
other observations, consumptive soldiers were known to have
had a turn for the better after a non-lethal bayonet wound in
the chest, Carson in Liverpool experimented with AP in ani-
44
Dr. Norman Bethune
mals and opened surgically the pleural cavity of some pa-
tients. Wide interest was aroused, especially in Germany,
when a paper by Forlanini of Pavia in 1882 recommended
systematic injection of air for TB. But it was a haphazard
procedure until the introduction of the X-ray examination in
1896, permitting accurate control of the collapse. Two years
later a Chicago surgeon best known for clarifying the prob-
lem of recognizing and treating appendicitis, John B.
Murphy, published his experience with AP in the Journal of
the American Medical Association. Within a decade or two, en-
terprising chest specialists and others in many countries were
trying it out. In Canada, reports indicate AP performed by
J.M. Rogers, a trainee of Murphy in 1898 in Ingersol, On-
tario; by McKinnon of Guelph, 1912, five cases in twelve ye-
ars; and Eugene Grenier, 1915, in Montreal, nineteen cases
in one year. Dr. Archibald reviewed the subject in 1913, quot-
ing a recent Swiss report, mentioning no cases of his own, but
in a detailed description of technique, advocated nitrogen gas
rather than air.
In many Canadian sanatoria AP came into use during the
war years of 1914 to 1918. For a while it was given to only five
or ten per cent of new patients but by the mid-thirties in some
sanatoria as many as half, or more, received AP. Bethune's
voice was probably the loudest, most insistent and most elo-
quent in Canada on behalf of this cause. "No sanatorium to-
day can call itself modern which does not have at least 50 per
cent of its patients under some form of collapse therapy." This
was his cry in conversation, at staff meetings and in at least
one recorded public address. It is considerably to his credit
that most Canadian sanatoria attained or exceeded the 50 per
cent goal before the decade had closed.
Of Bethune's many technical innovations in surgery the
one that fascinated us most, on the medical side, was the
45
Bethune: The Montreal Years
pneumothorax apparatus he designed and had built. It was
functional, trim and even beautiful compared with the heavy,
cumbersome apparatus generally used. With its case it
weighed only six pounds, about one-half or one-third the
weight of older models. Using the gasometer principle, two
transparent pyralin cylinders fitted vertically into one
another, about 14 inches in height and four in diameter. The
upper inverted cylinder, containing air, settled into the lower
one containing water as air flowed by tubing and needle into
the chest, the amount being indicated by the water level and a
graduated scale. Active compression of the lung, sometimes
desired, was achieved by pressing on the upper cylinder.
Since many patients required refills for years at weekly to
monthly intervals a simple, safe apparatus was advantageous.
Although other workers designed somewhat similar machines
for AP, Bethune's marketed by Pilling in Philadelphia was
most popular. It was characteristic of Bethune's generosity
that the contract with the Philadelphia firm specified that his
mechanic, Mr. Masters, should hold rights for manufacture
and sale of the apparatus in Canada, (incidentally, Norman
did not initiate his own pneumothorax in Trudeau. He did
begin to administer his own refills in Montreal after one of his
surgical colleagues seemed "a bit heavy-handed!")
When AP failed, or could not be established because of
adhesions binding the lung to the lining of the chest wall, two
possibilities remained, both surgical procedures. In thoraco-
plasty, ribs were removed to let the chest wall fall in and the
lung collapse; or more simply, the phrenic nerve accessible in
the neck could be cut, tied or crushed, depending on whether
a permanent or temporary effect was desired. This reduced
the work of the bad lung by inducing paralysis of that half of
the diaphragm, the muscular sheet separating the chest from
the abdomen. In open chest operations, another of Bethune's
46
Dr. Norman Bethune
inventions, called "The Iron Intern", gave the most satisfac-
tion to the most junior member of the operating team. The
intern's arms and shoulders suffered when he had to lift and
hold the patient's shoulder blade off the chest wall by means
of a retractor during lengthy thoracoplasty operations. A
combination of ball and socket joints, turnscrews and bars
created an artificial arm, forearm and hand, capable of sus-
taining a pull of 50 lbs. On the other hand, the surgeon was
more grateful for the shears Bethune copied with
modifications from a leather-cutting tool he saw in a cobbler's
shop. "It takes the hard work out of rib work," he said.
Bethune designed, had manufactured and reported in
journals about a dozen other instruments, some of them
prematurely, he admitted later. His last technical paper,
"Some new thoracic surgical instruments", rejected by the
Journal of Thoracic Surgery and published by the CM A journal
after he had gone to Spain in October 1936, had this candid
closing: Confessional note—I have abandoned the use of the
following instruments....", followed with references to seven
he had discarded, and his reasons for doing so. Of one he said,
"Its whole conception was shortly seen to be basically un-
sound. Fortunately, only one was made." Another was dis-
carded "in favour of Mauer's ... which is very much better."
Of the well-known necklace he had made to cover the inci-
sional scar left by film-star Renee Adore's phrenic nerve
operation, he said it was abandoned as unnecessary. "It was
taken, as it was meant to be, as an amusing little trinket."
Bethune's attitude towards these instruments tells us quite
a lot about the man. That he was ingenious mechanically and
translated notions into action like a flash, there is no doubt.
Getting a thing done was more important than observing con-
ventional niceties. When he had to backtrack he was for-
thright; no alibis. Friends said he had a strong "sense of
47
Bethune: The Montreal Years
theatre", always aware of and interacting with his audience.
Bethune also worked as a consultant at the Royal Lauren-
tian Sanatorium for tuberculosis at Ste. Agathe, then about
two hours by bus north of Montreal. I was there as a graduate
for the month of August in 1930 and usually contrived to be
present when Bethune made his rounds every week or two
with superintendent Dr. F. Learn Phelps to consider which
patients needed and were ready for operation. Artificial pneu-
mothorax was commonplace at the sanatorium, or "san" as
many called them, and was carried out by any member of the
staff. There Norman was concerned with offering the benefits
of AP earlier and to a larger number of people. Dr. Phelps
already had a good relationship with his patients and Be-
thune's approach strengthened further their confidence in the
two advisors. The new surgeon often explained with sketches
what would be done, what risks were entailed and what
benefit should accrue. Some of the patients had had in the
past a much less satisfactory experience in general hospitals
where surgery was required for other conditions.
At the beginning of my resident year at the Vic (July
1931) I worked closely with Norman on his work on oleotho-
rax. Some patients on pneumothorax absorbed their air faster
than others, especially at the beginning. This necessitated
their return for refill every few days which was often a hard-
ship for those living at a distance or without the means of
transportation. Why not, therefore, use a non-absorbable sub-
stance such as a chemically inert oil? Oleothorax was carried
out first in France in 1922. Dr. D.A. Carmichael of Ottawa,
after a European tour in 1928, reported in 1932 his experi-
ence with it in 105 patients. The Archibald team had used it
occasionally before Bethune's arrival at the Royal Victoria
Hospital in 1928. His contribution was to substitute simple
commercial cotton-seed oil instead of liquid paraffin or olive
48
Dr. Norman Bethune
oil (usually containing gomenol, a mild antiseptic). Bethune
recommended Wesson oil "as being cheap, pure and equally
effective." It was probably an advantage to omit the medica-
tion and rely only on the physical properties of the oil.
In the fall of 1930 and later that winter Bethune had be-
gun the treatment of three patients by oleothorax. In July
1931 he called them in for further assessment and asked me to
assist him. We examined them carefully, physically and by
fluoroscopy and X-ray films, then withdrew some of the oil to
examine microscopically for signs of irritation. Oil was added
if indicated by pressure readings and X-rays. Two of the pa-
tients made additional visits for further study. Further work
with oleothorax revealed its limitations but defined also other
circumstances when it was useful. Bethune summarized the
experience at the Royal Vic, most of it being carried out by
himself, in a report published by the American Review of Tuber-
culosis in December, 1932.
That July we spent the better part of half a dozen after-
noons in the old ward C of the out-patient department. For
me it was a unique experience. Bethune was in splendid form,
relaxed and amiable with both the patients and his assistant,
even when the latter dripped oil all over the place as the sy-
ringe and rubber tubing parted company. (This was because
the viscous oil flowed so slowly through the needle even when
it was of large bore.) The home setting of the patients inter-
ested him and he was sympathetic to their hardships. More
than once he took money from his pocket to contribute to the
cost of the trip to the hospital because some of them came
from far beyond the city limits. It was obvious that they loved
him and that he regarded all of them as real people—an un-
usual characteristic of a staff member in the out-patient de-
partment, some of us thought. Tenderness he showed but he
was no "bleeding heart". Two of these patients returned
49
Bethune: The Montreal Years
weeks or months later to the pulmonary clinic when Norman
was away and, after being attended to, looked me up to ask
how he was. They knew he was tuberculous too and they felt
real concern and interest.
The tales of Bethune's grateful and admiring patients and
of his tenderness when they were in distress, especially chil-
dren, spring from wherever he was caring for people—Strat-
ford, Ingersol, Detroit, Montreal, Spain and China. His rela-
tionship with others, however, has sometimes been described
in negative terms. However, during our contacts with him in
1930 and 1931, there was little hint of the more difficult side
of his temperament. This would be easy to explain on the
ground that we as house-staff on the medical side of the hospi-
tal were spared the dramatic tensions of the operating room;
and in no sense were we in competition with him and we were
eager to learn. But we and the hospital were only part of his
environment. Perhaps at that time his re-marriage to Frances
was still going well; if not, perhaps the strain was sufficiently
tolerable that his work at the hospital and in the laboratory,
which was going well, permitted him not only a good measure
of equanimity but also a genuine manifestation of his normal
joie de vivre.
Many of us who were medical students and young practi-
tioners admired Norman for his work, for his way of doing
things, and for his attitudes. He was a very unusual figure on
the Montreal medical scene. He was only ten to fifteen years
older than we were which meant that we had all been vividly
aware of the seriousness of World War I and its immediate
aftermath. Although only one of our dozen in 1930-31 and
none in our 1931-32 group had served overseas, when hostili-
ties ended many of us had been caught up with the spirit of
release from wartime conditions and of emancipation from
various orthodoxies and conventions. There was no agree-
50
Dr. Norman Bethune
ment, of course, on which conventions had been most irritat-
ing. In these respects there was little difference between Ca-
nadian graduates and the one-third of the two groups who
were Americans. Frequently during lively discussion we dis-
sected the hospital system and conjured up radical reforms.
Our talk did not mature beyond the level of fantasy because
for the most part that would have entailed the forcible depar-
ture of individuals, particularly in the institution's administra-
tion.
Certain of the veterans, for some of our generation, had a
significance that was almost mystical. They were emblems of
the bloody struggle "to make the world safe for democracy"
and at the same time they were committed to exciting new
ventures that might change the world. I really do not know
for how many Norman may have symbolized the double ele-
ments of continuity and change. He had the clipped, staccato
speech, military moustache and brisk movements of the army
or navy officer of action in the British tradition. At the same
time he appeared as the emancipated, life-loving veteran who
exuded contagious enthusiasm, was impatient with stuffy atti-
tudes and in a truly constructive sense, it seemed to us, had to
tear down the outworn old in order to build the new. My
guess is that this was in harmony with the mood of a substan-
tial minority of the total house staff of nearly thirty. The ma-
jority, including the interns and resident at the maternity pa-
vilion, may not have encountered Bethune and many of these
had other preoccupations and susceptibilities.
From the Royal Vic to Sacre-Coeur
Norman Bethune joined Dr. Edward Archibald in 1928 for
training in thoracic, or pulmonary surgery at Montreal's
Royal Victoria Hospital. Archibald was one of the giants in
51
Bethune: The Montreal Years
North American surgery. Delving into a dozen or more surgi-
cal fields, depending on the mode of classification, he
published over a hundred reports, definitive accounts or ex-
haustive monographs between 1897, the year after he gradu-
ated in medicine, and 1944, the year before his death at se-
venty-three. In 1906 he had been sent by the RVH to work
under Gower and Horsley in London, the leading neurologi-
cal physician and surgeon respectively of the time. On return
he did what neurosurgery was done at the Vic until the arri-
val of Penfield and Cone in 1928. Meanwhile at age twenty-
nine he had spent a year at Saranac Lake curing his own
tuberculosis and in due course had investigated pulmonary
function and the surgical possibilities of treating pulmonary
tuberculosis. Eventually he was called the father of pulmon-
ary surgery in North America, one of his accomplishments
being to extend German techniques and perform the first tho-
racoplasty on this continent.
Bethune was in sharp contrast to Dr. Archibald, at the
Royal Vic. Not, however, that Dr. Archibald and his associate
Dr. F.A.C. Scrimger, both of whom served on occasion in the
same capacity, were not greatly respected and warmly ad-
mired, but they were formal and we expected them to be so.
They were scholarly gentlemen, in the best sense of the term,
conservative in their expression, striving always to base their
clinical judgements on logical reasoning from the most reli-
able evidence they could elicit. This would be from the
patient's story, their findings at a meticulously performed
physical examination and the data from laboratory tests se-
lected with economy and discrimination. Unlike some others
they recognized the lowly intern and still-lower student or
clinical clerk as human beings whose errors or shortcomings
they would correct without a hint of contempt or ill will. Dr.
Scrimger, moreover, intrigued us as the only person we knew
52
r-
Dr. Norman Bethune
who had won the Victoria Cross, for bravery under fire at
Ypres in 1915, and he had gone overseas from the Vic with
Dr. John McCrae, author of the poem we all knew, In
Flanders Fields. We did not know that on April 29, four days
after Scrimger's act of valour, Private Norman Bethune,
stretcher bearer, also at Ypres, was wounded and put out of
action.
Archibald and Bethune, however, did not get along. What
began as frank mutual admiration, later showed signs of
strain, and eventually the two men separated. No two sur-
geons could be more unlike one another than Edward Archi-
bald and Norman Bethune. They had different goals for
themselves—as persons, as surgeons and, one might say in
retrospect, as citizens. No doubt they had different expecta-
tions of each other when the younger man joined the other's
team, one at thirty-eight and the other fifty-six.
Archibald was an explorer and experimenter, but in a
mould that had been charted from the time of Hippocrates by
an intermittent line searching for understanding of the ways
of nature. In other ways, as a member of a special subculture
in his social class, he was as captive of the tradition in which
he had been reared as was Norman: each was culture-bound
with respect to "tolerating difference", but the differences
each could tolerate were different! All his life Archibald dis-
played the scientist's trait of disciplined curiosity. His task
was to train others in the same direction. Like Bethune he was
"person-oriented" in respect to concern for the patient's com-
fort and recovery. That was part and parcel of his gentility.
He regarded Bethune in the operating room as "quick, but
rough, not careful, far from neat, and just a little dangerous!"
On the other hand, the younger surgeon regarded his chief as
too slow at operating and for that reason sometimes danger-
ous! Both men were failures in punctuality.
53
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Bethune was also an explorer in the sense of still seeking a
role that would express his divided allegiance to a cluster of
goals and traditions, the relative importance of which he had
not yet sorted out. Thus while mastering the craft of surgery
for the tuberculous he was experimenting in mechanical in-
vention, in art and poetry. When under special stress, as when
his second marriage with Frances fell apart, he was even more
diversified and, some thought, difficult. Archibald had
stresses to handle too. He had been caught in the middle of a
professional tussle a few years earlier between the university
and the hospital which delayed the building up of his surgical
team. Moreover, there were members of his department, not
on his own service, whose brand of surgery must often have
given him cause for anxiety. Each man was true to his own set
of values and loyalties, but they were largely in different
worlds. Bethune's aspirations and preparation had originally
been to be a practical, versatile surgeon, someone who might
work on the northern Canadian frontier. Given his back-
ground and make-up, neither of which he could choose, he
could hardly have become an academic surgeon-scientist of
the new breed; but then Archibald could not have done what
Bethune did in China.
The substantial contribution of Bethune to technical ad-
vances in surgery for pulmonary disease, especially tuberculo-
sis, is reflected in many of his papers published in medical
journals during his eight Montreal years. The one on the
pneumothorax machine has been discussed in a previous
chapter. Another, describing the practical steps required to
identify the microbes causing lung abscess, is written in the
style of the Edinburgh professor lecturing to candidates for
examination by the Royal College of Surgeons. With much
use of the grammatical second person imperative it would
have made an admirable chapter in a laboratory manual.
54
Dr. Norman Bethune
One paper, written in collaboration with his colleagues at
Ray Brook Hospital, describes the laboratory studies he car-
ried out under their supervision in the three months between
Trudeau and Montreal. A more characteristic paper was his
"Plea for early compression", written in 1932. It reveals a
benchmark in his growth that merits further attention.
The 1932 paper indicates one stage in the evolution of his
social thinking in respect to society's problems and disease. If
one asked doctors in 1932, "What is the cause of tuberculo-
sis?", most would have answered, "The tubercle bacillus," a
point established only fifty years earlier by Koch in Germany.
In tuberculosis circles, however, some would have indicated
overcrowding, malnutrition and the other accompaniments of
poverty as major factors in the spread of the disease. Bethune
stressed this point but added significantly, "We, as physicians,
can do but little to change the external environmental forces
which predispose to re-infection Those essential and radi-
cal readjustments are problems for the sociologists and economists"
(italics added). The physician was exempted from social re-
sponsibility but there was little understanding of the role of
the social scientist. Over the next few years Bethune devel-
oped a much deeper understanding of these matters.
If Bethune's career in thoracic surgery was launched by
Archibald at the Royal Victoria in the first half of his Mont-
real stay, it was the Sacred Heart period that saw the consoli-
dation of his international reputation as a surgeon and war-
rior against tuberculosis. The watershed was in January 1932
when Dr. G.E. Migneault, chief-surgeon on behalf of
l'Hopital du Sacre-Coeur at Cartierville on the northwest
outskirts of Montreal, asked Archibald to help them obtain a
qualified thoracic surgeon for their large newly established
tuberculosis service. Archibald recommended Bethune at
once but it took a year to convince all concerned, including
55
Bethune: The Montreal Years
the archbishop, that a Protestant anglophone should be ap-
pointed to a senior post in their Roman Catholic, franco-
phone hospital. Archibald's impasse was solved and Bethune
was provided with a golden opportunity to show what he
could do when in command.
In January, 1933, Bethune took up his duties as head of
thoracic surgery to serve the 500-bed tuberculosis service.
The hospital had been built seven years earlier by the Sisters
of Providence for chronic and seriously ill patients to replace
an institution for the incurables which had been destroyed by
fire. The morbid stigma tended to linger and the Order was
eager to take every step that would change the image. The
new surgeon despite some cultural shocks, looked like a gift
from God. The atmosphere was already one of exciting op-
timism. A group of young French-Canadian savants were try-
ing to create une medecine que'becoise equal to the best in the
world. Some of them moved later to PInstitut de Cardiologie
and to Sainte Justine (an outstanding children's hospital) to
continue that quest, successfully. Sacre-Coeur was the first
Montreal hospital to have its own blood bank.
At first the foreign doctor was looked upon as though he
might sprout horns, the Sisters having heard rumours that he
led "une vie de boheme". The doctors, even more punctilious in
dress than those at the RVH, were perplexed by his casual
attire, "comme la chienne a Jacques"—blue shirt, yellow tie and
in sandals without socks, like the friends of his youth, the men
of the woods on a Saturday night, but they would have worn
shoes. In no time, however, he won them over, the doctors by
his skill and enterprise, the sisters by his devotion and the
patients by his attentive care. The relationships became warm
and cordial.
There was a lot of surgery to do. Statistics are not avail-
56
Dr. Norman Bethune
able for earlier years but in 1935 over 1100 patients were
cared for, about 375 at a time. The majority of those admitted
were young, 61 per cent being between the ages of twenty-one
and forty. The overall death rate was 14.3 per cent and 37 per
cent of those who left hospital were unimproved. In the oper-
ating room nearly three hundred operations or procedures
were carried out, of which seventy-three were thoracoplasties.
Bethune would not have performed all of these in 1935 be-
cause of the agreement that he would train his senior assis-
tant, Dr. Georges Deshaies, already an experienced surgeon,
presumably to succeed him.
Regarding Bethune's surgery at Sacre-Coeur, my class-
mate, Vernon D. ("Doc") Schaffner of Kentville, Nova Scotia,
who was trained in thoracic surgery at the RVH in the early
thirties, noted in a letter to Rod Stewart:
(Bethune got) permission to operate on many very ad-
vanced bilateral cases... .This hospital ... was known as
the home of the incurables where people were sent to die
after hope had been abandoned. I feel he (Bethune) was
the first to do bilateral thoracoplasties on many hopeless
cases with what could be considered as rather encourag-
ing results. At least it led to its acceptance over the entire
country.
By the time of his Sacre-Coeur appointment, Bethune
was already well-known among the thoracic surgeons in both
Canada and the United States and the large number of cases
handled gave him the background to discuss surgical prob-
lems in great depth. His frank presentations at meetings of
the American Association of Thoracic Surgeons (A.A.T.S.)
were appreciated by the majority, especially the younger sur-
geons. He criticized the tendency to operate chiefly on cases
57
Bethune: The Montreal Years
offering the best risks. More lives would be lost but still more
would be saved, he argued, by doing more operations on the
more seriously ill than by "playing it safe".
On another occasion he spoke before the same association
on what he had learned from mistakes he had made and
dared his fellow members to be equally frank. The reaction, of
course, was mixed, many regarding it as a constructive contri-
bution. The paper was submitted to the Journal of Thoracic
Surgery but it was not published. Attempts to find the manu-
script, entitled "Twenty-five errors I have made in thoracic
surgery", have been unsuccessful.
In any case, Bethune's papers at Canadian and American
meetings, his publications and his visits at many centres had
put Sacre-Coeur on the map. Surgical pilgrims came to Mont-
real to see Bethune at work; no doubt visiting at the Royal
Vic too. The team of Bethune, Deshaies, Rolland and Cousi-
neau was praised as "un vrai ballet de mains". At home, Nor-
man took Rolland with him to demonstrate their technique at
1'Hopital Laval in Quebec and they went on consultation
trips to Sherbrooke and other Quebec cities. He felt well. He
had been able to stop his pneumothorax treatment before
coming to Sacre-Coeur and the phrenic nerve operation car-
ried out on him by Alexander at Ann Arbor was holding.
Life was good but for one thing—he still missed Frances.
The remarriage had lasted no longer than the first time,
barely four years. This was really his only area of failure. He
brooded over it, was sobered by it, but in no sense was he
depressed. On the contrary, his horizon of interest and insight
was broadening although in the socio-political sense he was
still conventional. At Sacre-Coeur he was closer to the grass-
roots community than he had been since Detroit. The relation
of disease to poverty and ignorance was more vivid than when
seen from the RVH. Visitors to the U.S.S.R. made claims
58
Dr. Norman Bethune
about another approach, which he resisted until challenged
by his friend George Mooney to go and see for himself. The
trip became another turning point in his life, to be followed
rapidly by commitments to politics, a health group, Spain and
China, all in the space of two years.
Could he have stayed in surgery? There was still a lot to
be done. No one could guess that by 1944 Waksman would
discover streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic for tuber-
culosis, that surgery for that disease would dwindle and sana-
toria would be the scene of "the miracle of the empty beds". I
suspect he realized that at Sacre-Coeur he would always be a
foreigner but in any case, with Deshaies and Rolland able to
carry on, he would not be needed. Montreal had become too
small for him. For Canadians the usual solution was to go to
the States and Bethune certainly could have done so.
A final aspect of the Sacre-Coeur experience is impor-
tant: here Bethune discovered the Quebec of the quebecois, the
quebecois as people. Although the language of many patients
at the Vic was French the staff life was culturally as English as
in Saskatoon. Only in Penfield's Montreal Neurological Insti-
tute (not McGill!) was there a deliberate, official effort to ap-
point representatives from the French-Canadian academic
world and bring them into the institutional life. The warm
hospitality and understanding of his colleagues at
Sacre-Coeur broke down Norman's cultural block on lan-
guage difference. He prized his new friendships greatly.
The Health Study Group
As Libbie Park records in the section which follows, in late
December, 1935, and January, 1936, Bethune invited a num-
ber of physicians, nurses, social workers and others to join
him in studying and doing something about a pressing social
59
Bethune: The Montreal Years
issue of the day—how to provide decent medical services for
the unemployed and poor in depression-ridden Montreal.
Each one of us was confronted by this problem one way or
another—the social workers in their impossible task of
searching for aids to subsistence where family income was
scanty or nil; the nurses at work in the crowded hospital out-
patient clinics or making home visits as public health nurse
for an agency; and the doctors in their work in the hospital
clinics and on the wards.
Four of the five doctors who joined us were working in
private practice, all depending for several years or longer on
older practitioners who were unable to handle all their calls.
The patients referred in this way were often unable to pay
regular fees, or required house calls at awkward hours or in a
distant part of the city. This did not mean that we were not
busy, since most of us also worked in the out-patient depart-
ment of a hospital from two to five mornings a week. Some of
us also attempted to follow a senior physician's rounds on the
public ward for an hour or two in the mid-day. Often we did
not earn a cent until later in the day at our own offices. I was
more fortunate than others because I had slipped into a vac-
ancy in a six-office group on returning to Montreal from the
States in October, 1934.
The problem of setting fees for patients was probably the
most distasteful experience in my six years of practice in Mont-
real, nor was the advice of a senior surgeon helpful: Just
charge a bit more than you think you can get! The doctors
responding to Bethune's invitation already had the opinion
that the fee-for-service system was pernicious. The doctor had
neither the skills nor the time to play social service worker. At
this point in the depression, the most urgent need was to over-
come the financial barrier that prevented underemployed
60
Dr. Norman Bethune
health professionals from serving underserved people. The
second issue was to determine what kind of organization of
health services would work most effectively, in disease preven-
tion as well as its control or cure.
Returning in October 1934 from two years in Saint Louis,
I was struck by the limited interest displayed in these matters
in staff circles at the hospital I had joined, the Royal Victoria,
compared with the considerable ferment one encountered in
Barnes Hospital and the faculty of the medical school of Wash-
ington University. Joining "Beth's group" around Christmas
1935 and looking at Montreal's acute medical care problem
was therefore one of my most satisfying experiences. Since my
return to Montreal fifteen months earlier I had been preoccu-
pied with starting practice, with the hospital activities already
mentioned and with plans for marriage. From the beginning
the group was rewarding. It was a link with the stimulating
attention paid in Saint Louis to health aspects of the depres-
sion. It fitted in with a new development in Montreal, the
League for Social Reconstruction, a kind of Fabian Society
parallel to the new CCF. My engineering friend, Jacques
Bieler, had introduced me to the LSR and new friends, par-
ticularly Leonard Marsh, McGilFs new research social scient-
ist from the London School of Economics, who was examin-
ing the impact of low income on health. The "social" goals of
the LSR called for a more efficient health system and an equit-
able distribution of its benefits.
Perhaps more important to me personally, the group was
concerned with alleviating the distress of patients I recalled
my father describing so often at the evening meal in my stu-
dent days. His work in Montreal was mainly to make pastoral
calls on Presbyterians in the hospitals and old folk's homes.
There he encountered former parishioners from rural Eastern
61
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Ontario, many of whom had suffered hardships or even dis-
aster due to the high cost of serious illness. This subject had
not been a part of our medical studies.
The group was extraordinarily congenial although few of
us had worked together before. There was a sustained sense of
purpose despite a rather indefinite membership. Some
worked at it harder than others, some dropped in and
dropped out, but no one was upset by this.
In my own thinking, Hyman Shister and Libbie Ruther-
ford (as Libbie Park was then called) made up, with "Beth" of
course, the core of the group. Each had been striving by read-
ing and discussion to understand better the social and politi-
cal implications of the crises of that year. Mussolini's invasion
of Abyssinia in an undeclared war was three months old; Hi-
tler's massive rearmament was well underway and in a few
months his military reoccupation of the Rhineland would
take place (March 1936); and the catastrophic depression
showed no signs of relief anywhere. Later, Francis McNaugh-
ton, Moe Braunstein and Kathleen Dickson became key par-
ticipants.
Hy Shister was a gentle person, shy, but on matters of
principle, forthright. He had a clear enquiring mind, much
goodwill and a sweet disposition. The relationship between
Norman and Hy, which began when both were at the
Women's General Hospital in 1934, was one of mutual
affection and admiration. Norman stayed with the Shisters
just before his departure for Spain.
Norman's intellectual and moral leadership was tremen-
dous. He devoured the literature on our subject, and there
was a lot of it. The most relevant information came from the
Committee on Costs of Medical Care in the U.S., and the
1934 report of the Committee on Economics of the Canadian
Medical Association was of great interest. There was word of
62
Dr. Norman Bethune
group prepayment plans for hospital care in Edmonton and
Winnipeg, and decades earlier there had been the miners'
plan in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.
When the group was preparing its proposals, which would
be issued in July-August 1936, we were never so naive as to
expect the medical profession to swallow them holus bolus, but
we hoped for discussion. It is inaccurate to say that the profes-
sion rejected the proposals; the profession as a body never
considered them. It was the apathy that was disturbing.
Some Montreal doctors, of course, found Bethune's views
on health care distasteful and even dangerous. There were a
good many, however, and not only the younger ones, who
were seriously disturbed by the ineffectiveness of medical ser-
vices in relation to the needs and were trying to approach the
issues with an open mind. In later conversations some of these
agreed that Bethune in the speeches he made to the Montreal
Medico-Chirurgical Society in December 1935 and April
1936 had made some good points, but they, like myself, were
political illiterates.
One senior surgeon, of Archibald's vintage but only age-
wise, replied to our proposals for health insurance and other
reforms by saying that it "sounds suspiciously like an attempt
to feed at the public trough The state cannot and should
not be responsible for the health of its citizens; on the con-
trary the citizens are responsible to the state to provide a pro-
per quota of physically and mentally able persons to support
said country. The ruler's duty is to prevent the entrance or
spread of elements hurtful to the physical or mental well be-
ing of its citizens." I am afraid that "elements hurtful" re-
ferred to both ideas and persons.
As far as my own experience went, the only unfavourable
comment was from another surgeon, later to be chief, who
advised, "MacLeod, if I were you I wouldn't have so much to
63
Bethune: The Montreal Years
do with that fellow Bethune. It won't do your practice any
good." Actually, the only effect I noticed then or later was
beneficial. I enjoyed acquaintance with a number of interest-
ing artists and other intellectuals of liberal viewpoint. Later,
my chief, Professor Jonathan C. Meakins, suggested I culti-
vate my interest in social medicine as a coming field.
In the group Norman bristled with ideas, but unfortu-
nately we kept no minutes and were not diary writers. I can
recall some of his observations, however, particularly concern-
ing his trip to the U.S.S.R. for the International Physiological
Congress in August of '35. His bias before and during the
visit was to be critical of the communist society. Although
reports of a breakthrough in health matters had intrigued
him, still he was sceptical. But he found in operation many of
the measures he had been advocating—testing all children
with tuberculin to detect early disease, half-way homes for
day or night care when convalescents from tuberculosis were
beginning to work again and medical stations in factories.
With his love of children he was delighted by the warm, nat-
ural atmosphere in the daycare centres and playgrounds.
The Canadian surgeon was greatly impressed by Pavlov's
opening address at the congress. The principle of the condi-
tioned reflex had enormous implications for the shaping of
the individual, and ultimately, of society. It could work to
man's advantage, or it could be destructive. In a letter to Hy
Shister, Bethune wrote: "I think we are only now beginning
to appreciate what Pavlov has done for the science of human
behaviour. He's given us a new approach to the basic prob-
lems of disease we react to our conditioning. Not only our
reflexes, mind you, but even our tissues, even our blood
cells ..."
Be that as it may, we are all agreed that throughout the
group period, at least in our contacts with him, Norman was
64
Dr. Norman Bethune
composed, quietly confident, patient, tolerant of other's views
and of any lags in understanding. He seemed to be contented,
optimistic about the future, even when he switched his focus
from health planning to Spain. Integrative forces seemed to
be at work in his thinking.
His writings and addresses in the later years in Montreal
reveal stages in an evolution in his comprehension and objec-
tives and style. His Christmas card in 1934 carried a flippant
"Wishing you a happy pneumothorax", with a sketch of his
machine and on the reverse side his clever, sacrilegious Com-
pressionist's Creed. His addresses of December '35 and April
'36 and the proposals of the summer suggest stages of matura-
tion from the dramatic debunker to the polemical adversary
recommending sweeping Utopian reforms and finally, to the
disciplined analyst and planner recommending programmes
which were perfectly feasible—if the professions, the
influential sector of the public and the majority of politicians
had been ready for them.
The year 1935-36 did indeed include experiences that
must have contributed to Norman's peace of mind and a sort-
ing out of his values. There were at least two important com-
panionships, separate, different and beautiful. There was also
his thinking through of political matters and finally, as
Stanley Ryerson will describe, his commitment to the Com-
munist Party in November 1935. I knew he was exploring
Marxism, as so many did and as others wanted to when they
could get the time. I did not know that he had joined the
party until after his return to Spain. The mood in our circle in
those "Spanish years" was to look at a person's attitude to-
wards the critical issues rather than at his political affiliation.
This was the atmosphere within the Committee on Medical
Aid for Spain, of which I was a member. My own contacts
and affinity were in the direction of the LSR and CCF, but I
65
Bethune: The Montreal Years
seemed to be too busy to go beyond medical activities. As for
Norman, however, he was never content with halfway meas-
ures. He would throw himself completely behind the cause he
believed important. He would lose himself in it and thereby, I
am sure he felt, gain what he had come to believe was most
important in life. Francis McNaughton wrote a eulogy of
Norman Bethune after his death and referred to an editorial
writer who had stated, "The politics behind the wars in which
so many of his years were spent meant nothing to him. He was
a doctor, and he was in them to save life, not to take it."
Francis said, "This statement is hardly true. He was not
merely interested in saving life. He had plenty of opportunity
to save life through his surgical work in Montreal. He was
interested in making life worthwhile, and went to Spain and
China because he was concerned with the issues at stake
there." I share that view.
66
Epilogue and Notes on Sources
When Bethune left for Spain in October 1936, the Montreal
Group for the Security of the People's Health had reviewed
various health systems and presented concrete proposals to
government and the professions. But with Duplessis as the
new premier of Quebec no experimentation with different
methods of extending health services could be expected.
However, carrying on with the concerns they had shared with
Bethune before his departure, the members of the group be-
came involved in an important project to determine the
health needs of low-income families.
In collaboration with major welfare agencies a team of
nutritionists, social workers, public health nurses and eight
physicians determined the nutritional status of twenty-five
families who had been living at a relief level of income for five
years. In addition, school health records from 1931 to 1937
were analysed to find out the heights and weights of 1800
Montreal boys living at three socio-economic levels. Impres-
sive differences were found, as reported in Health and Unem-
ployment: Some Studies of their Relationships by Leonard G.
Marsh (Oxford University Press, 1938). Later that year the
group met with members of the Montreal Junior Board of
Trade's Committee Re: Group Hospitalization and adminis-
trators of the Montreal General and Royal Victoria hospitals.
Because of the hospitals' opposition, no action was taken until
1942, when new leadership and changing attitudes prepared
the way in 1944 for the province's first group health insurance
plan under the joint auspices of hospitals, physicians and gov-
ernment.
There is no recollection of group activity after May 1938.
The Bethune type of leadership was missing and members
became preoccupied with their special interests. All were as-
67
Bethune: The Montreal Years
suming increased responsibility in their respective hospitals,
including clinical teaching. Nearly all, including the nurses,
were involved in some kind of extra community service. If not
rebuilding society, they were at least doing some good patch-
ing. In 1939 the definitive Study of the Distribution of Medical
Care and Public Health Services in Canada was issued by the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene (Canada). Some
data from the Marsh study, collected in part by members of
the Bethune group, appears on pages 75-77. This publication
provided ammunition for lectures and addresses by several
members in Montreal, Halifax and elsewhere during the en-
suing years.
Wendell MacLeod acknowledges with gratitude the generous
permission given by Ted Allan and Roderick Stewart to use
their research files in Toronto and Markham. Each has been
helpful in many other ways. Any writing on Norman Bethune
is of course influenced by felicitous phrases and diction in The
Scalpel, The Sword by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon
(McClelland and Stewart, 1952 and 1971) and in Stewart's
Bethune (New Press, 1973) and The Mind of Norman Bethune
(Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1977). Mary Larratt Smith's Pro-
logue to Norman, The Canadian Bethunes provided valuable in-
formation. Hilary Russell's paper presented in May 1978 at
the Third North American Fur Trade Conference in Winni-
peg, and her studies on the Bethune family for the Research
Division, National Historic Parks and Sites, Ottawa, for the
Norman Bethune Memorial House at Gravenhurst were also
valuable. Much of the historical information on the Royal
Victoria Hospital was derived from Royal Victoria Hospital
1887-1947 by D. Sclater Lewis (McGill University Press,
1969). To describe Bethune's experiences at Sacre-Coeur
68
Dr. Norman Bethune
Hospital in Cartierville, Quebec, the author used material col-
lected by Jean Pare which first appeared in Le Maclean
(mars, 1973). The generous aid of the staff of the Osier Li-
brary, McGill University, especially of Dr. E.H. Bensley and
Marilyn Fransiszyn, is gratefully acknowledged.
69
PART TWO
Norman Bethune
As I Knew Him
Libbie Park
First Impressions
The world of 1935 that Norman Bethune knew in Montreal
included two overwhelming realities: at home, unemploy-
ment and relief (estimates of the number on relief in Montreal
ran from 20 to 33 per cent of the city's population); and
abroad, the continuing series of aggressive actions by the
Nazi-Fascist powers that were to end in World War II.
I first met Norman Bethune on October 30, 1935, at a
meeting organized by the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU)
at Strathcona Hall, across the street from McGill. Bethune
was the main speaker. He had spent part of the summer in the
Soviet Union, in theory to attend the Fifteenth International
Congress of Physiologists held at Leningrad and Moscow in
August, but in fact, as he said in his talk, mainly to meet
Pavlov, the great Russian physiologist, then close to ninety
years of age, and to observe the Soviet people and their efforts
to build a new society.
Norman Bethune was then in his forty-fifth year, twice
divorced from Frances Penney. He had been living in Mont-
real since 1928 and was then working at the Sacre-Coeur
Hospital as the head of chest surgery, an appointment that
began in January, 1933. He liked his work there and had
congenial relations with the staff, both doctors and nursing
sisters. He operated one day a week and was paid $1,200 a
year.
73
Bethune: The Montreal Years
He was also on the staff of the Women's General Hospital
(now the Reddy Memorial Hospital) and had an appointment
at the Veterans Wing of the Military Hospital at Ste. Anne de
Bellevue. These appointments kept him busy and gave him
enough to live on. He never had a private practice during his
years in Montreal. His income while not high was adequate,
and his appointments left him time to do other things that
were important to him: painting, reading, and later his work
with the Montreal Group for the Security of the People's
Health, the children's art classes and his free clinic for the
unemployed.
When I met Norman Bethune I was married, had two
children and was living in Montreal West. My married name
was Rutherford.
I was born Libbie Campbell Aird in Montreal, on Jeanne
Mance just below Pine Avenue. My parents, George and
Ellen Aird, also born in Montreal, died when I was very
young and I lived with either my father's or my mother's
people until I was married. I graduated from the Montreal
General Hospital School of Nursing and worked for a brief
period in New York before returning home to be married.
My father's family was Conservative and Presbyterian.
Mother's family were Liberals, with varying religious
affiliations. Mother was Church of England, but attended the
Presbyterian church until my father died. She then returned
to the Anglican church.
In my formative years I never heard politics discussed.
Politics was a man's world. Up until the twenties the only
election I can recall, oddly enough, is the Reciprocity election
of 1911, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier was defeated and reciproc-
ity with the U.S. shelved. It seemed to me then that Laurier
and Reciprocity were two words that thickened the atmos-
74
Bethune As I Knew Him
phere in the house. After the election they were heard no
more, but for me a warm affection for Sir Wilfrid lingered.
I lived through the careless twenties without too much
thought about anything serious except the best book on how
to care for babies and rear children, and those years were
happily occupied with that. For recreation I played golf and
read. Any talk of politics at home was very casual. We were
members of the American Presbyterian Church until it closed
and then we joined Erskine Knox Crescent Church and at-
tended irregularly. My taste was for the Anglican service as I
remembered it with my mother but in fact I was not religious.
In Montreal West there was a splendid lending library
and I don't believe I have ever appreciated reading as much
as I did in the twenties. The authors whose books I read dur-
ing those years included Marcel Proust, Romain Rolland,
Flaubert, Stendhal, the Russian novelists and dramatists,
Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, John Gal-
sworthy, E. M. Forster, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser. For
local news the Gazette, Montreal's anglophile morning paper,
and for world news the New York Sunday Times. There was of
course no television and very little radio.
When the market failed in 1929 people became panicky
about their money and their future. A young woman acquain-
tance committed suicide when her husband lost all his money.
Many people we knew suffered heavy losses. Each day
brought increasing awareness that a different attitude based
on different values was called for. The secure middle-class
lifestyle and values of the twenties, once so casually taken for
granted, no longer served, and the struggle to maintain them
lost meaning.
The stock market crash to some meant only an end to
dreams of wealth and luxury, but to the great majority it
75
Bethune: The Montreal Years
brought the harsh reality of the continuing depression, unem-
ployment, poverty, bread lines, soup kitchens, loss of dignity,
increased illness and death from curable diseases.
I began to do voluntary work in the Out-patient Depart-
ment of the Montreal General Hospital and there we were
constantly reminded of the depression by over-crowded clin-
ics, over-worked doctors and nurses, helpless patients waiting,
endlessly it seemed, for attention, and it was there that I be-
came aware of what the depression could mean.
Later I accepted an offer to do refractions in the Eye
Clinic, two afternoons a week at the Montreal General, and
two at the Western General at Atwater and Dorchester
streets. This was an extended role for a nurse; it involved
measuring the refractive error in the patient's vision in order
to determine the lens that would correct it. I worked with Dr.
Stuart Ramsay, Dr. B. Alexander and Dr. S. O. McMurtry.
One day the newspapers would tell us that even worse
times were coming, the next that recovery was just around
the corner. I became restless and curious trying to find
answers to the questions of the time: why the depression? I
could see it, see what it meant, but why? Newspapers were
full of rumours of war—why? What were the Russians do-
ing? What did Nazism and Fascism mean?
People on the Left with whom I became acquainted were
calling for a vigorous effort by governments to provide jobs
and end the depression. The answer of the traditional parties
was that there was no money. The Left was emphasizing the
threat of war; Ottawa was silent. A few short years later bil-
lions of dollars were available for war.
I had begun going to left-wing lectures and meetings. I
attended some LSR meetings (the League for Social Recon-
struction, brains trust of the CCF, predecessor of the NDP),
some of the Peoples Forum meetings held in the Unitarian
76
Bethune As I Knew Him
church on Sherbrooke street. I remember hearing talks by
Dr. Harry Ward, chairman of the American League against
War and Fascism, Emma Goldman speaking on revolutionary
art, and John Strachey, then the brightest star among En-
glish-speaking Marxist intellectuals, speaking on the nature
of capitalist crisis (the title of one of his books) and on the
danger of war. Though I heard people from a range of politi-
cal views, the speakers of the Left turned out to be the only
ones whose answers made sense to me. I remember especially
Louis Kon, Bella and Alex Gauld—all well-known left-
wingers whom I met at FSU meetings. At the LSR, Frank
Scott and Eugene Forsey impressed me as able speakers, con-
sidered by many as far more to the left intellectually than in
practice, and I remember Fred Rose and Stanley Ryerson
leading discussions on Marxism.
I was at the FSU meeting to hear Bethune because I knew
Louis Kon and his family. Louis, the principal figure in the
Montreal FSU and its active head, had organized the meet-
ing. He was an extraordinary person about whom a separate
book ought to be written. Enthusiastically pro-Soviet, he was
never, as far as I ever knew, a member of the Communist
Party of Canada, and in fact was frequently critical of its posi-
tion and policies. Louis was Russian by birth but was obliged
to leave his country after the 1905 revolution, and considered
himself an Old Bolshevik. He had worked for a number of
years with the Grand Trunk Pacific railway in Winnipeg, and
later with the Montreal Light, Heat and Power, was widely
known, and had been a member of an official Canadian trade
mission sent to Siberia by the Borden government just after
World War I.
Louis Kon was a lively letter-writer as his friends and
many newspaper editors knew. His letters were an event, ar-
riving in an envelope carrying a blue sticker with a verse by
77
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Ralph Chaplin, supporter of the militant International
Workers of the World (the IWW, the Wobblies):
Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie—
But rather mourn the apathetic throng—
The cowed, the meek—
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak!
The poet's reproach could never have been applied to Louis.
The FSU was a lively organization attracting Commun-
ists and non-communists curious about life in the Soviet
Union. That autumn of 1935, in addition to the meeting ad-
dressed by Bethune, the FSU held three meetings on Novem-
ber 7 (in Lachine, Verdun, Rosemount) to commemorate the
Russian revolution, held a meeting for former Czarist Gen-
eral YakhontofF at the Windsor Hotel Ballroom on November
11 with R. L. Calder, K. C, in the chair, heard Professor
Stanley Ryerson on November 14 on Developments in Russia
since 1917, Bill Kon on November 28 on the Soviet Union
seen as New Democracy, and on December 12 heard three
speakers: Ryerson, H. Barry and Bill Kon on Lenin, Stalin
and Gorky respectively. Bill Kon, son of Louis and Elsa Kon,
was a writer and active on the Left. He was killed in 1945
during World War II when his Royal Air Force plane was
brought down over Belgium.
That night at the FSU meeting Bethune was speaking to a
friendly interested audience that filled the hall. I had not
heard of him before I was told about the meeting by Louis
Kon and urged to come. Bethune had a remarkable platform
manner, speaking as though addressing each one of his audi-
ence personally, with tremendous charm, ranging from rough
to gentle. His style of speaking was in crisp, short, clear sen-
tences, warm, excited, as if he was captivated by what he was
78
Bethune As I Knew Him
saying. He was gentle to persuade, and rough to jerk his list-
eners into thinking. He wore his clothes well (tweeds and a
turtleneck sweater), and carried himself with casual elegance.
His topic was his visit that summer to the Soviet Union
where he had been one of the Canadian doctors attending the
International Physiological Congress. Some 1200 scientists
from around the world had attended, the great attraction be-
ing the presence of the world-famous Russian scientist Ivan
Pavlov, who conducted the experiment demonstrating the
conditioned reflex in a dog.
Meetings of the congress were held in Leningrad and
Moscow from August 9 to 16, 1935, and Walter Duranty, for
many years N.Y. Times correspondent in Moscow, author of /
Write as I Please, covered the congress. Canadian newspapers
carried front-page stories. Pavlov opened the congress and
Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard made the principal
address of the first day.
The list of Canadian participants included what are now
some of the distinguished names in Canadian medicine and
research. Dr. Hans Selye was there, as was Dr. Frederick
Banting, already a Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of
insulin with Dr. C. H. Best. Dr. J. B. Collip of Montreal spoke
on the opening day of the congress on "Anti-hormones".
Other Montreal doctors at the congress included J. S. L.
Browne and David Slight.
Banting and Bethune, almost the same age, both Univer-
sity of Toronto graduates, were deeply impressed by what
they saw in the U.S.S.R., and both spoke and wrote about
Soviet achievements in the fields of preventive medicine and
public health, and the role that science and scientists were
playing in the Five Year Plans.
Other Canadian doctors were also impressed by visits that
year to the Soviet Union. Sir Andrew MacPhail, professor of
79
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Medicine at McGill, on his return in early August from
spending the summer abroad, including a trip to the Soviet
Union, told a Gazette reporter that "there were two sides to
Russia, the one he saw, the one he read about." Sir Andrew
described it as a country with no poor, no rich, no unem-
ployed, and, he added, "no Communists." "The people of
Russia," he said, "were well dressed, quiet, apparently happy
and full of hope."
Bethune spoke that night of his impressions of Soviet soci-
ety, the people, and their revolution. His speech was not with-
out criticism of conditions in the Soviet Union. He told of
swimming in the Neva, of walking the streets of the city ob-
serving the mood of the people, and he described visits to
hospitals and clinics. He was enthusiastic over what was being
done to "eradicate one of the most easily eradicable of conta-
gious diseases, tuberculosis" and at the treatment of tubercu-
lous patients, especially of the rehabilitation periods in day or
night sanitaria, and the follow-up of contacts.
The Gazette account of the speech the next day emphas-
ized his critical comments and reservations—how the aver-
age standard of living in Russia today approximated the stan-
dard of the Canadian dole but was infinitely higher than in
Czarist Russia, and would be immeasurably enhanced during
the next ten years. It went on to quote him:
I still believe in Marxism but I am uncertain as to Lenin-
ism. I believe that Leninism has lost the spiritual and
religious aspects of Marxism, Marx having been one of
the true religious leaders of the world and in a line with
Spinoza and Jesus. Whether it was necessary that the
lovely idealism of Marx and Engels must go through the
changes which Lenin insisted upon, I don't know, but I
don't think that Russian Communism ever will suit us. It
80
Bethune As I Knew Him
is too hard, too brutal. I don't think we are ready for it,
and this on two accounts; first because power cannot be
taken away from the capitalist class in this country with-
out force and I don't think Canadians are prepared to
use force. Second, I don't believe we passionately are
convinced that Communism is the only way of living.
We are not convinced because we fear to surrender our
individualism.
If we could combine this economic communism
with spiritual and intellectual individualism, that might
be the solution. But are we going to be regimented into
thinking alike? I don't think we would tolerate that. Our
political system is founded on democracy and freedom of
speech and action. I acknowledge it is somewhat limited,
especially in Quebec, but there are things I can say
under this system which I cannot say under the com-
munist system.
I still recall the dramatic ending of his speech with a quote
from Isadora Duncan's autobiography in which she describes
her confinement: "There I lay, a fountain spouting blood,
milk and tears." Bethune compared the birth pangs described
by Isadora to the rebirth of Russia. Agony and ugliness, he
said, are necessary to birth, and Russia was going through
this violent and revolutionary and necessary process.
After the meeting Louis introduced me to Bethune. We
shook hands and I congratulated him and left the hall feeling
that I had met an unusually attractive man. I did not realize
that this was to be the beginning of a brief, intense friendship
and of my co-operation in the Montreal Group for the Secu-
rity of the People's Health. It was a friendship made intense
by the climate of the time, the sense of urgency and later of
shared responsibility to act against the mindless indifference
81
Bethune: The Montreal Years
of governments that allowed the depression to continue and
sought to avoid war by appeasing the fascist dictators.
The Way It Was
By mid-1935 Hitler had already been in power in Germany
for two years, finding support from embittered veterans of
World War I, from the unemployed, from disillusioned young
people, from business interests large and small, and was set-
ting out to provide jobs through re-armament, dismantling
the trade unions in favour of a government Labour Front,
jailing opponents, preparing the attacks on Jews, all in the
name of National Socialism.
Mussolini, in his early days a Socialist opposed to war, was
setting up a corporate state in Italy, jailing the opposition,
actively planning his attack on Ethiopia. In the Far East, the
expansionist rulers of Japan had occupied Manchuria and
mounted an attack on China proper. The Chinese Red Army,
blockaded in the south by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, had
broken out of encirclement in October, 1934, and was
fighting its way to the north, the famous Long March, that
eventually brought Mao Tse-tung and his supporters into po-
sition to inspire unified resistance of all Chinese to the Japa-
nese invaders.
The examples of Hitler and Mussolini were attractive to
substantial and influential forces in Western Europe and
North America. Was Hitler not showing how to deal with
trade unions; was his government not a barrier against the
spread of Communism ? After all a strong leader was needed,
not a parliamentary talk shop. I began to understand that the
threat of war walked hand in hand with attacks on the institu-
tions of democracy.
In August, 1935, with the U.S.S.R. already into the Sec-
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Bethune As I Knew Him
ond Five Year Plan, the Seventh Congress of the Communist
International, meeting in Moscow and Leningrad (at the
same time as the International Congress of Physiologists at-
tended by Bethune) recognized the need for all anti-fascist
forces to unite in a struggle to defend democracy and prevent
war. The decision reversed the position of the communist
movement in which social democrats had been denounced as
"social fascists" and in which no distinction was made be-
tween the fascist powers and the capitalist democracies. The
decision was a simple recognition of necessity, of a unifying
trend that was already in existence as Communists, Socialists,
plus conservatives and liberals who believed in the defence of
democracy, sought to overcome past animosities in a struggle
against common enemies.
The times produced leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt in
the United States and Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, who de-
fended the interests of their peoples as against the rights of
property. In France, Spain and Chile, Popular Front govern-
ments were formed on the basis of local experience; those of
Spain and Chile included Communist ministers.
By mid-1935 Canada was almost five years into the de-
pression with no end in sight (the economists felt that 1933-35
represented an upturn, but the unemployed would not have
agreed), and the solution for the lack of jobs when it came
four years later turned out to be war.
In January, 1935, in a series of radio speeches Prime Min-
ister R. B. Bennett, the arch-Tory, announced his conversion
to reform, a change from the 1932 speech in which he had
threatened to apply the "iron heel of ruthlessness" to crush
communism and socialism. The Gazette felt that the 1935 ser-
ies of Bennett speeches was so far to the left as to indicate that
R. B. had come under the influence of Litvinov, the Soviet
Foreign Minister (whom Bennett had met at Geneva) and of
83
Bethune: The Montreal Years
John Strachey and Sir Stafford Cripps, whose works Bennett
was supposed to have been studying. Sir Stafford was on the
left of the British Labour party; John Strachey, a former Lab-
our M.P. in Britain, had recently published The Coming
Struggle for Power, a Marxist analysis of the crisis in Britain
and the world. (That same month newspapers were reporting
annual meetings of Canadian banks showing an increase in
earnings, and carrying renewed prophecies by bankers that
better times were just ahead.)
Mackenzie King, leader of the opposition, was reviving
Liberal reform phraseology, and attacking the new Bennett as
a demagogue. (The R.C.M.P. attack on the unemployed at
Regina—the "Regina riot"— on July 1 of that year showed
that the basic Bennett had not changed).
The CCF was barely in existence although it had strong
representation in parliament in J. S. Woodsworth and mem-
bers of the former Ginger Group, the left farmer-labour
group that developed out of the Progressive Party in the mid-
twenties.
Harry Stevens headed a Bennett-appointed Royal Com-
mission (Lester Pearson, secretary) busy investigating the
spread between costs and retail prices; Stevens, a member of
the Bennett cabinet, broke with Bennett and formed the
short-lived Reconstruction Party for the 1935 election.
The Social Credit Party under William Aberhart won a
provincial election in Alberta, directing its main attack
against the banks and financial institutions and their control
of credit.
The Communist Party of Canada was emerging into open
activity moving from denunciation of the CCF to a recogni-
tion of the need for united action by the Left against the
forces threatening war and reaction. I remember hearing Tim
Buck speak to an overflow meeting at the American Presbyte-
84
Bethune As I Knew Him
rian church on Dorchester Street shortly after his release from
prison.
In Quebec in mid-1935 the Liberal government of Louis
A. Taschereau was still in power; it was to be badly shaken in
the election of November, 1935 but Maurice Duplessis would
not come to power until August, 1936. Camillien Houde, re-
cently decorated with the Order of the British Empire, later
to be interned during World War II, was mayor of Montreal,
alternating in his reading, according to an anecdote told
much later by Carl Goldenberg, between Italian Fascist mate-
rial and Marx's Capital. "If you are going to lead people, you
have to know where they are going," Houde explained to the
then youthful future Senator.
As if R. B. Bennett's conversion to reform was not extraor-
dinary enough, all kinds of panaceas and proposals were be-
ing put forward. The British-Israel Federation (the lost tribes
of Israel) was publishing advertisements calling for the
purification of legislative assemblies, the sweeping away of
false prophets (unnamed) and urging Canada to become the
spearhead of the forces of God in the greatest crisis of the
world. In Vancouver newly elected Mayor Gerry McGeer de-
nounced the "legalized thievery of the banks" while asking
the holders of Vancouver city bonds to accept a 50 per cent
cut in interest. And Mayor Houde, speaking to the Young
Reformers in Montreal, appealed for a reduction in the num-
ber of women working (this would provide jobs for men), at-
tacked big business, and warned of "the peril from Asia".
Montreal, English-speaking Montreal to be more accu-
rate, heard a succession of speakers that year, right and left,
seeking to explain what was going on in the world. The
Peoples Forum, Temple Emanu-El, the Saturday Night Club,
the LSR, to say nothing of political parties, service clubs,
church groups and organizations of every kind, conducted
85
Bethune: The Montreal Years
forums, public meetings, to meet the concern of people trying
to find out what had gone wrong.
In those days before TV and in-depth interviews and talk
programmes, the public meeting remained the best way to
reach an audience (unless one owned a newspaper) and for an
audience to be informed. A newspaper account of the meeting
would hopefully reach an even wider audience. An attractive,
well-known speaker could fill a hall and raise funds for the
organization sponsoring the meeting or for a cause. With a
little planning, popular figures could be imported from the
United States or Britain.
Newspaper coverage was adequate although sometimes
tendentious. Looking back over the newspaper stories of the
period it is interesting to note the remarkable contrast be-
tween news stories about meetings in, for example, the Ga-
zette and Le Devoir. A reader of Le Devoir would have little
awareness of the wide variety of meetings attended by Eng-
lish-speaking Montrealers. John Strachey, a star attraction
of the Left, rated a column or so in the Gazette, not a line in Le
Devoir.
The depression bore most heavily on the jobless, on those
whose wage rates were cut, on farmers whose cash income
melted away. For those fortunate enough—there were not so
many of them—to have a steady job at a fixed income, the
depression presented advantages rather than problems. Prices
went down. Few bank presidents suffered much, but to be
unemployed and on relief in Montreal in those days was to be
in a desperate situation. Housing deteriorated as families dou-
bled up; health suffered as relief scales were held to a mini-
mum. There was no Unemployment Insurance; that came
only with the war. In Quebec (as in New Brunswick) there
were no Old Age pensions.
Municipal relief scales in Montreal were $39.48 a month
86
Bethune As I Knew Him
for a family of five, or $474 a year, with the recipient allowed
to earn up to an additional $12 a month before the relief pay-
ment was reduced. A single man received $1.80 a week. The
Montreal Council of Social Agencies calculated that a family
of five needed $20.36 a week as a minimum subsistence re-
quirement for food, clothing, rent and "upkeep".
When the Sisters of Providence appealed for funds in
1935 to support their soup kitchen on St. Catherine Street
East (where 1,150 men were given one meal a day) they stated
that for one dollar they could feed one man for fifteen days,
for two dollars he could be fed for a month, and twenty dol-
lars would feed him for a year. The Sisters were appealing for
$20,000.
In the federal relief camps under General A. G. L.
McNaughton, from 20,000 to 30,000 single unemployed were
fed, clothed and lodged and paid twenty cents a day for work-
ing under semi-military discipline on projects, some useful,
others make-work.
Even if you were employed life was not all that easy. Wage
rates for skilled and unskilled labour were low and being
forced lower. That year painters in Montreal signed a collec-
tive agreement giving them sixty cents an hour. The federal
government had just set minimum wages for factory work
contracts with the government at thirty cents an hour for
males over eighteen years of age, twenty cents for all females.
The Price Spreads Commission was holding sittings in
Montreal, and in January the president of Whittall Can was
explaining to the commission that the average wage of fifteen
and a half cents an hour his company was paying to women
and boys was "not low for the City of Montreal." In fact, he
said, he could let all his employees go and hire replacements
for less.
In the big Montreal department stores the percentage of
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
female employees earning less than thirteen dollars a week
ranged from 56 per cent at Ogilvys to 73 per cent at Morgans
to 91 per cent at Dupuis Freres. Eaton's in Montreal em-
ployed 1,102 women, of them 765 (69.4 per cent) earned less
than thirteen dollars a week. There were 914 male employees
and 186 of them (20.3 per cent) earned less than thirteen dol-
lars. With an average work week in Quebec in 1935 of 50.5
hours, thirteen dollars a week meant about twenty-five cents
an hour.
Statistics, no matter how revealing, can't and don't show
the whole picture. Persons who lived through "the Depres-
sion thirties" in Montreal tell vivid stories. One who was then
a newly arrived young immigrant from Poland, told of being
homeless, and out of work during one of those depression
summers. Down to his last cent, he had to apply for relief. You
could get one free meal a day at soup kitchens—a bowl of
thin soup, a slice of bologna, a slice of bread and a cup of tea.
Fortunately it was summer. The only place for the homeless
to sleep under shelter was in the flop houses, so crowded and
revolting that a man would choose to sleep on Fletcher's Field
in the open air.
That was the area on the east side of Park Avenue north of
Pine, opposite Mount Royal, previously a ball park. In sum-
mer hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unemployed, old and
young, slept there every night. During the day they would
pick newspapers out of garbage cans, and before sundown
converge on Fletcher's Field to choose a place to sleep. As it
got darker, a latecomer had to step cautiously to avoid earlier
arrivals already asleep under their newspapers. You chose
your place, spread some newspaper on the ground and
covered yourself with the rest. To a passerby, Fletcher's Field
on a clear night resembled a huge graveyard with flat white
tombstones.
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Bethune As I Knew Him
In the morning, there was no water and no place to wash,
only a ditch to use as a latrine, if the police didn't see you.
Across the road to the west was the forbidden area of Mount
Royal, with lovely green trees and grass and a small waterfall
running down the side of the mountain where one could wash
and refresh oneself, if the police had not prevented you from
crossing Park Avenue, or if the few privileged squatters who
had dug themselves in on Mount Royal and claimed it as
their own did not forcibly run you off.
Demonstrations were organized, and hundreds of men
and women marched with placards, demanding jobs. They
faced police on horseback, wielding bludgeons. Men received
scalp wounds, women were pulled along by the hair. The Mont-
real police and the unemployed in confrontation, 1935-36.
Rosemount, a district in Montreal where the CPR's An-
gus Shops and other heavy industries are located was particu-
larly hard hit by the depression. Many industrial workers
lived there, a good place to live until the depression struck
and one industry after another closed down and Rosemount
became an area of unemployment.
When electricity or gas bills were not paid, power and gas
were cut off. The Rosemount residents were politicized and
militant. They found ways to re-connect gas and electricity
and use the stoves to heat the kitchen and cook their food.
And if they were caught? A jail sentence for the man of the
house. When he got out of jail, of course he had to do the
same thing over again. The jails filled and eventually the pol-
ice gave in.
The jail sentences were based on an act of the Quebec
legislature giving special rights to Royal Electric, a predeces-
sor of Montreal Light, Heat and Power, the giant corporation
then headed by Sir Herbert Holt, tycoon extraordinary, presi-
dent of the Royal Bank of Canada. Under the Act a person
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
found guilty of "stealing" electricity was obliged to pay one
hundred dollars to Royal Electric, a penalty fixed by the sta-
tute, and as well pay the costs of the prosecution, plus four
dollars a day for the time the meter was illegally connected,
plus double the price of the electricity used. Everything had
been thought of. At one time in 1935 the company met defeat
in a group of six cases when an accused argued that the MLH
& P was not entitled to the special privileges granted to Royal
Electric. But the next time a case came up, the lawyers for the
MLH & P arrived in court with documents to show that
Royal Electric was still in existence, that it was operated by
the MLH & P and the latter company was entitled to the
penalties. Magnanimously, the MLH & P lawyer renounced
any claim to the penalty in that case, so the unfortunate ac-
cused had only to pay the costs (or go to jail).
When rent was not paid tenants were evicted. Families
would double up. A friend, then a young married woman
with a child, recalls leaving her home one day to find her
neighbours, a family with nine children, on the street sur-
rounded by their furniture and other belongings. Three
neighbours divided the family among them, the mother,
father and three children coming to one flat, three children to
the flat of each of the other two neighbours. The first flat was
small and with five extra was crowded, but as bedtime came
so did the other six children, all wanting to be with their
mother when they went to sleep. So—what would you do?
The Rosemount people organized a Tenants League to
protest evictions, but it was not until the war came that indus-
tries reopened and men and women could get jobs. They went
into industry or to war.
Louis Muhlstock, a friend of Bethune's in Montreal,
looked at the physical forms of the depression through the
observant eyes of an artist distinguished for the sensitivity in
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Bethune As I Knew Him
his work. In those days Louis would walk past Fletcher's Field
or on Mount Royal. One hot summer day the men lying on
the ground on Fletcher's Field had put jackets or shirts over
their faces to shield them from the sun. The grey or brown
shapes stretched out gave the impression of rocks scattered
over the field. He paused for a moment to make a lightning
sketch of a man stretched out and immobile as though asleep.
As Louis turned to move away, the man said quietly, "Don't
leave, there is room for all of us."
People began to fight back against the conditions I have
been describing. There were many of course who simply ac-
quiesced in what was happening, but those who were not pre-
pared to accept what was handed out to them—either in re-
lief, or in official versions of what was going on in the world—
began to find ways to express their views. The unemployed
began to organize and demand jobs, tenants fought back
against evictions, relief recipients demanded adequate relief
scales, the trade union movement began to take a new lease
on life as industrial unions came into being largely because of
the valiant work carried on by organizers of the Communist-
led Workers Unity League. Resistance to repression in-
creased, the menace of war was a rallying point.
Taking an active part in arousing public opinion in fav-
our of collective action against aggression in order to prevent
war was the Canadian League Against War and Fascism, la-
ter the League for Peace and Democracy. Its chairman, A. A.
MacLeod, was to work closely with Bethune in support of
Spain.
Several of Bethune's friends were involved in activities
that reflected this spirit. One who admired him was Lilian
Mendelsohn, a woman of courage and determination who
during the thirties and until her death in 1978 was a staunch
fighter for the rights of others. She was a competent, attrac-
91
Bethune: The Montreal Years
tive woman, well-known and a highly thought of member of
the intelligentsia, a person with the same drive for action as
Bethune had. Her particular contribution was to start the
New Theatre Group, a field she knew and loved and had
some experience in. A few young and talented people worked
with her. Actors in the main were factory workers. To house
the theatre a friend lent an unused building, a warehouse. A
platform was installed and wooden seats for the audience.
Lilian Mendelsohn was producer and director. The en-
trance fee was fifty cents, if you had it. The plays all dealt with
realities of the thirties: the threat of war, the frustrations of
the unemployed, the struggle to organize. Among them was
Clifford Odet's play, Waiting for Lefty which ran for seven-
teen weeks.
Another activity with Lilian Mendelsohn at the helm was
the Saturday Night Club, which came into being in the early
thirties. It was organized at a time in Montreal when a
speaker could be arrested or threatened with arrest for saying
something the police considered subversive. The organizers
of the club, a group of eighteen men and women, felt that the
police would have a hard time preventing a public forum with
speakers of differing points of view.
In December 1935 a number of delegates from Montreal
attended a national congress against war and fascism, held in
Toronto. The Saturday Night Club was one of the Montreal
organizations represented. George Mooney, prominent in the
YMCA and a close friend of Bethune's, told the congress that
"Quebec is the most fascist province we have in Canada."
Mooney was representing the Montreal Council of the
League Against War and Fascism. He had been a CCF candi-
date in Verdun in the federal election of that year and got a
substantial vote. He had helped Bethune get YMCA accom-
modation in which to hold a free clinic for the unemployed in
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Bethune As I Knew Him
Pointe St. Charles on Saturday mornings. Mooney later
worked for the Montreal Metropolitan Commission, the War-
time Prices and Trade Board and, during the war, for the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In
China for UNRRA just after the war Mooney was one of the
first Canadians to discover the high regard in which his old
and dear friend was held by the new forces in China.
These activities and the people involved were all part of
the climate in which Norman Bethune moved rapidly that
autumn of 1935 towards the Communist Party of Canada and
towards a decision to use his professional skills in the most
direct way possible in the world struggle against fascism.
Common Interests
After the FSU meeting where I first met Bethune, we saw
each other again at the homes of friends and at meetings.
When he learned that I was working two afternoons a, week at
the Western hospital out-patient department, just around the
corner from the apartment on Fort Street where he was living,
he gave me a standing invitation to come in for tea which he
made every day after his afternoon rest, part of the routine
established at the sanatorium. By this time we had discovered
a number of common interests, so I dropped in when I could
that autumn and winter and spent an hour or so, discussing
books we had been reading, experiences shared. Most of his
friends called him Beth and so did I, but one day he said,
"Libbie, call me Norman. It's my name."
Not long after, I invited a few friends in one evening to
hear Norman talk about his visit to the Soviet Union. He
enjoyed exposing smugness of any kind in any form. One of
my friends was a member of the then fashionable Oxford
Group, a believer in Moral Re-armament, a follower of Dr.
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
Frank Buchman. What, she asked Norman, was thought of
the Oxford Group in the Soviet Union? Nothing at all was
said about it there, he retorted, but I think of it as Jesus
Christ in a dinner jacket. The reply was apt, but not one that
encouraged further comment.
Friendship with Norman Bethune led one into unex-
pected places and situations. One cold Sunday night that
winter I had gone alone to a meeting held in St. James United
Church on St. Catherine Street. I saw no one I knew, and the
speaker turned out to be dull beyond listening. I was thinking
of leaving when I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a
whisper: "Christ, this is dull—how would you like to
dance?" It was Norman. "I'd love to" was my Answer. "I have
a friend who wants to dance," he said, "so let's go." The
friend turned out to be a young woman I had met before, and
the three of us walked around the corner to the Auditorium
on Mayor Street. This was a dime-a-dance place, with a huge
dance floor and a wonderful band. Upstairs was a gallery with
tables for refreshments. I danced through a strip of ten tickets
with Norman—we both liked dancing—and then left for
home in Montreal West, leaving Beth and his friend behind.
Another unexpected visit occurred the following spring,
on a lovely fine morning when I was busy at home. Norman
was then working at Sacre-Coeur Hospital. He arrived in his
car and asked me out for a drive—to be back in about an
hour. I hopped into the car and off we went. He was unusu-
ally quiet and I was content to drive in silence. Suddenly,
without warning, I found myself sitting alone, waiting for
Beth, breathing in the most dreadful smell. We were in an
abattoir, and Beth, as he later explained, had gone to get
something he needed for laboratory work—a pair of lungs,
pig's I think. I recovered enough from my initial shock to
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Bethune As I Knew Him
show an interest in what he had come for, and we drove off
with the lungs.
The Fort Street apartment where Norman was living in
late 1935 (before then he had been living on Baile Street, with
his friend Dr. Aubrey Geddes) was directly over the apart-
ment of his friends the Brandtners, and this was a great joy for
Beth. He had become a close friend of Fritz and Mieze
Brandtner. Fritz was a painter, born in Danzig, who had emi-
grated to Canada in 1928 and lived in Winnipeg with his wife
Mieze. In 1934, the Brandtners moved to Montreal, where
the first painting Brandtner exhibited was bought by Be-
thune.
Bethune had for a short time studied painting, and a
painting by him was hung in the 1935 Spring Show of the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He was delighted to have the
opportunity to work along with Fritz in his apartment. He
admired Fritz's experimental, expressionistic work, finding it
new and exciting. They once did a non-objective painting
together, applying alternate brush strokes to the canvas.
Fritz Brandtner looked like an out-door man and was
fond of the phrase "nature I love, and after nature, Art." He
was an imaginative person, and when you were lucky enough
to know and be with him for even a short time you knew that
in fact art was everything to him. He thought in art forms,
saw objects in art forms. Mieze Brandtner, a sensitive and
gentle person, understood Bethune in a way that only a few
could. Today she speaks of him as "delightful company, al-
ways understanding, never rude or arrogant."
Brandtner's first big exhibit in Montreal was, through Be-
thune, sponsored by the Canadian League Against War and
Fascism, two aspects of life that Brandtner abhorred; he had
served in the German army in World War I; he left Nazism
95
Bethune: The Montreal Years
behind when he left Germany in 1928.
Robert Ayre, art critic of the Gazette and a friend of
Brandtner and of Bethune was impressed by the exhibition.
He thought Brandtner was "a force to be reckoned with ... he
is in a word an expressionist, what he paints is not a ship at
sea but joy, not a hill, but a sense of well-being, not a man, but
the horror of war."
Norman's Fort Street apartment itself was small and strik-
ing. You entered a fair-sized room used as studio, living room
and bedroom. You were confronted with red walls, a wide
couch with a "gentian" (Norman's word) velvet cover thrown
over it, bright red, yellow and green cushions scattered on it.
On the sill of the not-too-large window was a little green
flowering plant (I suspect put there by Mieze), and in front of
the window, on the floor, a mattress, also covered in blue, and
on it a yellow upholstered bed rest with arms, and cushions
the same colour as the couch. An easel stood just off the
centre of the room. On it was the unfinished portrait of Nor-
man that Brandtner was painting. A phonograph, table and a
couple of chairs completed the furniture. I remember only
one painting (I am sure there were more) hanging in the main
room: Sunflowers by Brandtner, and the colours in the room
echoed the vivid colours of the painting.
One day I asked Norman what kind of music he liked,
and the answer came quickly—"I don't like listening to mu-
sic of any kind, the only record I play is Beethoven's Eroica—
for breakfast." I learned later that he had studied music for a
while but gave it up because he found it too demanding. He
did not have the time to give to it and this meant constant
frustration.
Norman and I were both reading more political material.
We talked about books like Anna Louise Strong's / Change
Worlds, Julius Hecker's Moscow Dialogues, the Communist
96
Bethune As I Knew Him
Manifesto, Engels' Anti-Duhring, John Strachey's Coming
Struggle for Power. In discussing the Communist Manifesto his
was the simpler approach—"I feel humble before it," he
said,"as I do before all great wisdom; it must be approached
with a mind completely cleared of accumulated rubbish, the
clear and open mind of a child."
Most of us on the Left in those days were oriented towards
New York. That was where the most stimulating writing,
painting and acting was going on. We were watching Roose-
velt and making comparisons with Mackenzie King and Ben-
nett. We were reading the weekly New Masses, enjoying its
cartoons, and its political articles and reviews. In Canada the
only publication of this nature was the monthly and short-
lived New Frontier, published in Toronto in 1936-7, which ex-
pressed a left-wing united-front point of view, competing with
and seeking to influence the Canadian Forum.
Friends of Bethune in Montreal were contributing to New
Frontier. Fritz Brandtner's name appears as an "associate" of
the editorial board on a couple of the early issues. Drawings
by him and by Louis Muhlstock appeared in the issue which
reprinted Robert Ayre's article on Brandtner. Other Mont-
realers involved included Norman Lee, later active in the
Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the artist Gordon
Webber. At one time Bethune sent New Frontier a short story
called "Encounter" which was turned down by the editors
(probably considered too frivolous, though no one remembers
just what happened).
The "encounter" was a midnight meeting on the street
between two characters, one, the writer, hot from a political
argument on the merits of communism, the other a total
stranger to him. For as long as possible Bethune lets the
reader believe that both are human. In fact it is an encounter
between a man and a dog. Bethune, amused or piqued, gave
97
Bethune: The Montreal Years
copies of the rejected story to friends, with the words, in my
case, "To Libby, Beth, refused by New Frontier." Later the
magazine would carry his reportage from Spain. Bethune
liked to express himself vividly in anything he wrote. I recall
him saying "I wish I could write in a loud voice like Paul de
Kruif' (a bacteriologist who wrote a series of popular books
on health subjects).
Bethune was captivated by his study of Marxist philoso-
phy. Dialectics, the idea that everything was in process of
change, that change took place through contradiction, the
idea of the change from quantity to quality, excited him.
Medicine, he said, was one of the most dialectical of sciences:
"Funny, I've been practicing dialectics all my life without
knowing it."
We had been reading Frederick Engels' Anti-Duhring in
which Engels puts down a German professor who had worked
out his own style of socialism. Norman and I read extracts to
each other and discussed them. He was interested in Engels'
writings and enjoyed Engels' sense of humour. He was also
amused at the way Engels in Origins of the Family led into a
discussion of monogamy by declaring that "if strict monog-
amy is to be regarded as the acme of all virtue, then the palm
must be given to the tapeworm which possesses a complete
male and female apparatus in every one of its 50 to 200 seg-
ments of the body, and passes the whole of its life in cohabit-
ing with itself in every one of those segments."
Norman may or may not have believed in monogamy but
I liked his attitude towards women. He had none of the ste-
reotyped male attitudes, and did not speak of women in a
derogatory sense. A woman was a person, her mind not the
mind of a "woman" but of a person. In argument he was
never patronizing, never appeared to make allowances; if he
disagreed with a woman he would not spare her. He respected
98
Bethune As I Knew Him
women and would not put up with hypocrisy or "moralizing
philistines", be they men or women.
Norman loved women and said he loved women passion-
ately and made love with some. Women I have known who
were in love with Norman have spoken of him in very
different terms. To one it was an experience she wanted, one
for which she shared the responsibility, without regrets. To.
another the experience simply demonstrated what she thinks
of now as Norman's mindless pursuit of all women. For me
the word "womanizer" so often used in connection with him
vulgarizes Norman Bethune's attitude towards women and in
no way captures the kinds of relationships that existed be-
tween him and women who were often friends, and sometimes
lovers.
Bethune's visit to the Soviet Union was probably the deci-
sive point in his political development. As well as his FSU
speech, there was also his well-known talk entitled "Through
the Looking Glass", made at a symposium held just before
Christmas 1935 by the Medico-Chirurgical (Med-Chi) Soci-
ety of Montreal, an organization of physicians and surgeons.
Four doctors spoke at that symposium, all of whom had
attended the Physiological Congress in August. Their subject
was the status of medical sciences in Russia.
Dr. Hans Selye spoke on "The Position of the Medical
Sciences in the USSR", Dr. J. S. L. Browne on "Events of the
Congress" (with special emphasis on banqueting, according
to the minutes), Dr. David Slight on "Social and Psychologi-
cal Medicine", followed by Norman on "Through the Look-
ing Glass."
Norman had arranged to speak last to be able to comment
on the position taken by "my fellow Leningraduates." If they
condemned Russia, he would praise her; if they praised her
he would diminish her. And this, he explained, was not "in a
99
Bethune: The Montreal Years
spirit of pure perversity, but from a concern for truth, which
often consisted in the conjunction of apparently irreconcilable
aspects of reality." Yes, a visit to the Soviet Union could be
described in an article called Malice in Blunder land : yes,
Russia was a land of topsy-turvey, but then who was it that
was standing on their head? And yes, one could speak of
Diddle-Me and Diddle-You (a reference to the Intourist
travel agency), and yes, one had to believe impossible things
as the White Queen did, yes, Stalin and Lenin might be de-
scribed as the Walrus and the Carpenter, with the NEP men
as oysters, but the Soviet pawn, like Alice, did have the
chance to become a queen—and that was the faith and hope
of communism in a nutshell.
Bethune in his peroration again made the comparison be-
tween childbirth and the pangs that Russia was going
through in her rebirth. "What would a person think, watch-
ing for the first time a woman in labour, and not knowing
what was occurring to her? Would he not be appalled at the
blood, the agony, the apparent brutal cruelty of the atten-
dants, the whole revolting technique of delivery? Would he
not cry 'Stop this, do something, help, police, murder?'"
Agony and ugliness, said Bethune, were necessary and always
would be necessary to birth. So what could truthfully be said
about the woman in labour? Ugly, yet beautiful, pitiful, ludi-
crous, grotesque and absurd, yes, but magnificent and sub-
lime. That was birth, and Russia was going through her re-
birth, and the mess had not yet been cleaned up. "Creation is
not and never has been a genteel gesture. It is rude, violent
and revolutionary." And he ended with an appeal that was in
fact a statement of faith:
It is the passionate belief of Communists that the de-
700
Bethune As I Knew Him
grading poverty and misery of modern life is not the will
of God but the wilfulness of man. But to those noble and
courageous hearts who believe in the unlimited future of
the human race, its divine destiny which lies in its own
hands to make of it what it will, Russia presents today
the most exciting spectacle of the evolutionary, emer-
gent and heroic spirit of man which has appeared on this
earth since the Renaissance. To deny this is to deny your
faith in man, and this is the unforgivable sin, the final
apostasy.
I have quoted from a copy of the speech which contains a
number of changes and additions in Bethune's handwriting
that look as if they had been made while he was waiting to
speak. The reference to Communism was an insert, as was the
reference to the wilfulness of man. The strengthening of the
wording expresses his turn towards the Communist Party of
which he was then a member.
Bethune continued to be, as he had been in the past, a
fairly familiar figure at Med-Chi meetings up to the time he
left for Spain. He had presented case-reports at meetings on
February 6, 1931 and November 18, 1932. The minutes of
October 6, 1933, show him joining in the discussion. On
March 7, 1936, ten weeks after the symposium on the Physio-
logical Congress, the Med-Chi Council recommended that he
be nominated as an Associate Fellow of the Society, and this
was duly approved on March 20. On April 17, 1936, the
newly named Associate Fellow was to make a major and con-
troversial speech as part of a symposium on Medical Econom-
ics—a speech in which he called for a complete re-organiza-
tion of the medical profession and a re-definition of medical
ethics.
707
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Rocking the Medical Boat
One afternoon soon after Norman and I had become friends
in the autumn of 1935, I dropped in at the Fort Street apart-
ment and found him and Brandtner with a large piece of
paper stretched out on a table. They were both working at a
sketch of a Model City for tuberculous patients. It was a deli-
cate drawing in pastel colours, done in great detail, of a centre
for patients ready to leave hospital but who should not return
to their homes, to the environment where they had contracted
the disease, until they were in good enough health to resist
re-infection themselves and not to infect others, and able to
take part in normal activities. The centre included everything
needed for full rehabilitation—clinics, living accomodation,
recreation centres, parks, shops and workshops where the ex-
patient could learn a trade or craft, or practise his own.
This was Norman's dream, and he visualized the city as
eventually self-sustaining. He had not been able to get any
positive reaction to it from his colleagues, and he was infuri-
ated at the lack of imagination, the total disregard, and some-
times the laughter with which it was received. But he wasn't
discouraged. The sketch that he and Brandtner were working
on that day was to support his argument on the practicability
of the Model City. I don't know if it was ever finished.
I was less than positive myself in my reaction to his plan.
It seemed Utopian and too elaborate for a time of unemploy-
ment and bread lines. A plan for the improvement of general
medical services seemed to me more likely to win the support
of the medical professions and of governments. My comment
was not considered very satisfactory and I was told so. He
continued to discuss the Model City project with lay and pro-
702
Bethune As I Knew Him
fessional people and the general reaction, unfavourable or un-
interested, had an influence.
The next time I was at his place, about two weeks later, he
had put aside the Model City and was beginning to think in
terms of an overall health scheme that would do away with
the existing precarious condition of medical services for the
people and the accompanying economic insecurity for the
physician.
Bethune had already been in touch with Dr. I. S. Falk in
the United States, the author of The Present and Future Organ-
ization of Medicine and other publications on related subjects,
and had begun to receive material on systems of medical care
from Britain, from other European countries and from the
United States. To read and digest all this material so as to be
able to make use of it was an overwhelming task—a full-time
job for one person. He would have to enlist the help of others
and, characteristically, he began at once to make plans.
Norman already knew a few young doctors interested in
the social and economic aspects of medicine. They would be
the nucleus of an expanding group of doctors, nurses, social
workers and dentists that would work out a proposal for
medical and health care in Quebec. He asked me to join and I
agreed.
Norman understood from the beginning something that
not all doctors at that time would have accepted. It was not to
be only a medical group, a group of doctors; it was to be a
medical and health group, which to be of real value had to
include all the allied professions, and if possible they should
all be included in working out a health plan. This was the
political task that Bethune set himself. He visualized the
group growing, the original members attracting others, and
he thought of public meetings with distinguished speakers on
103
Bethune: The Montreal Years
related subjects. But the main line of action would be to finish
a study of medical and health services in developed countries
and their relationship to the state, to be used as a basis for
proposals on medical and health services in Quebec, for
which the support of the medical and allied professions would
be enlisted. He had in mind a printed document or pamphlet
which would be widely circulated.
He was not interested simply in study and discussion. He
wanted study, discussion, and then action. One of his criti-
cisms of the League for Social Reconstruction (I remember
him at one or two LSR meetings) was that members of the
audience were listeners, and not doers, that everything was
talk and no action.
Percy Newman, a friend of Norman's in those days, recalls
going with him and Frances, his former wife, to an LSR meet-
ing at the Coffee House on Union Avenue. According to
Newman, Bethune rigorously and in rather a hostile manner
questioned a speaker dealing with public health matters, sug-
gesting a more radical approach than the speaker was willing
to accept.
At the time we did not fully appreciate the value of the
work being done by the LSR. Their research did have an
impact in changing Canadian reality. Social Planning for Can-
ada, the main LSR work, appeared in 1935 and was one of the
most important books of the decade.
Our group was not in competition with the LSR. We were
a working group concentrating on one field in which we all
had a special interest, while the LSR was dealing with all
social problems. A year or so later Wendell MacLeod, Kay
Dickson and Grant Lathe, all associated with the Bethune
group, helped in the preparation of a comprehensive study by
Leonard Marsh of the LSR, Health and Unemployment, in
which Dr. Grant Fleming, director of the department of Pub-
104
Bethune As I Knew Him
lie Health and Preventive Medicine at McGill, and C. F.
Blackler collaborated. Norman had been in touch with Flem-
ing about the work of our group.
I believe the nucleus of the group met for the first time at
the Fort Street apartment. If my memory is correct those pre-
sent at that first meeting were Norman, Wendell MacLeod,
Hy Shister and myself. Even then it was evident that a larger
place would be needed for meetings if we were to expand. At
that time I was living in Montreal West, too far from the
centre of the city to be able to offer a place to meet. Norman's
Fort Street apartment was too small, so what to do? One of us,
Hy Shister I think, invited the group to his home for the next
meeting, and we started to meet more or less regularly, wher-
ever it was convenient for one of our group to have us.
At that first meeting Norman outlined his proposals,
which were agreed to, and we then discussed the best way to
divide the work. It was decided that each person should take
a developed country and study its health and medical services
and their relationship to the state, so as to form a basis of
comparison with Canada and the United States.
By the second meeting we had added Kay Dickson, a Vic-
torian Order nurse, and Dr. Moe Bronstein and Dr. R. Gott-
lieb to the group. Dr. Francis McNaughton joined us later,
and at one time we had the help of an actuary from the Sun
Life, whose name I do not remember, to work out cost com-
parisons of various health programmes. Dr. Ruth Dow at-
tended irregularly. She was an intern at the MGH when I
went back to work there. There were other members of the
group whom I don't recall. I know Florence Pike was a mem-
ber but I don't remember her at meetings. Dr. H. N. Segall
has spoken in an interview of being present at group meetings
and I had not remembered him at all. His memory is equally
selective. He doesn't remember any women at group meet-
705
Bethune: The Montreal Years
ings. There were nearly always two of us, sometimes more.
Of those members who made the greatest impression on
me, I remember especially Dr. H. E. Shister, always Hy to the
group, then in cardiology at the Women's General—a gentle,
sensitive person, a close friend of Bethune's, and a responsible
and devoted member of the group. Dr. Wendell MacLeod
was there from the beginning: earnest, jolly, full of enthusi-
asm, at that time a hard-working general physician who also
fulfilled his responsibilities to the group. Kay Dickson, a
pleasant and most sympathetic woman, was particularly inter-
ested in the promotion of health services because of her work
with the VON. The Public Health nurse and the VON in
particular, are closer in their everyday work to the conditions
of the patient's environment than any other health worker.
Francis MacNaughton, soft-spoken, a lover of music, joined
the group shortly after it was organized and was a valuable
addition.
Members of the group held differing political and philo-
sophical views. What brought us together was a common con-
cern at the deplorable condition of the health of the people
and the health and medical services available to them and the
economic problems of the medical and allied professions.
Not all members did research on specific countries. Wen-
dell MacLeod chose Denmark, Hy Shister, France, Bethune,
Britain and the Soviet Union, since he had worked in Britain
and had studied the Soviet system. The group started work
and new ideas were added as we went along. At our meetings
there were never more than ten or twelve persons present,
more often less. Among Bethune's papers is a page from his
desk pad with the names of sixteen of us, apparently to be
called for meetings. On a few occasions an out-of-town guest
was invited and attendance increased, going beyond the
membership of the group.
706-
Bethune As I Knew Him
Norman missed few meetings and acted as secretary and
leading spirit, always with a new idea. If by chance he was out
of town attending a conference or for any other reasons we
would try to adjust our meeting to his return. We rarely met
without him. His personality was the dynamic that made the
meetings lively.
They began early, about 8 p.m. and finished around 11
p.m. There was no formal agenda. Norman would open the
meeting with a few pungent remarks. We would have a report
from a member selected at the previous meeting who would
outline his findings on the country he had chosen. If there
were problems, he uncovered them; other members had come
prepared to discuss the topic and problems and the exchange
of views continued until we felt satisfied that we had some-
thing we could use for our project. There was no need for
minutes and no minutes were kept, since the speaker made his
own notes on suggestions arising out of the discussion.
We tried to meet every two weeks. Later when we had the
Quebec provincial election in mind as a target date for action,
those of us who could do so, met once a week. There was a lot
to do and a lot was done.
We never attempted to make the meetings social. Those
present were anxious to discuss professional problems and
hear the views of others. There was a good feeling in the
group, no tension, and no friction of any kind. The meetings
though business-like were warm and friendly. If business only
was the tenor of the discussion most of us were in contact with
other members between meetings. And so we moved along.
Once the meeting was over Norman relaxed completely,
and I recall him driving Kay Dickson and me home to Notre-
Dame-de-Grace and Montreal West in his little Ford
roadster, singing sentimental songs like Among My Souvenirs
and Moonlight and Roses. The volume of sound, not very me-
707
Bethune: The Montreal Years
lodic, tended to increase as we drove through the quiet, re-
spectable streets of Montreal West nearing my home.
The group began informally, with little organization and
no name. It was not until we were prepared to address our-
selves to the public that we had to find a suitable name for the
group. By this time Norman in his public speeches had begun
to talk about socialized medicine. At least twice, once to mem-
bers of the Mid-South Medical Assembly in Memphis, in Feb-
ruary, 1936, and again to members of the Med-Chi Society in
Montreal in April, he made an ardent defence of socialized
medicine. Perhaps the majority of our group would have sup-
ported socialized medicine in one form or another, but we
were trying to work out a practical health and medical pro-
gramme, one that could be brought into being within the
existing framework of society by building popular support
and by putting pressure on governments that certainly were
not socialist. In both of these speeches, seen in retrospect,
there was a certain lack of clarity in his discussion of social-
ized medicine.
The lack of clarity came from the failure to decide
whether socialized medicine meant a system of medicine
under socialism, part of the structure of a socialist society, or
whether it referred to a form of state medical care to be
achieved as a result of public pressure within a capitalist
framework.
Norman used the words "socialized medicine" but gener-
ally in the context of practical proposals for immediate appli-
cation. True, in the Med-Chi speech he says that "the best
form of providing health protection would be to change the
economic system which produces ill-health, liquidate igno-
rance, poverty and unemployment," and states that "the real-
istic solution" is socialized medicine. But his practical propos-
als are that health protection should become public property
108
Bethune As I Knew Him
like the post office, the army, the school, to take three of his
examples. A limited health insurance plan (his emphasis ap-
pears to be on the word "limited") is not, he said, true social-
ized medicine but a "bastard form of socialism produced by
belated humanitarianism out of necessity."
The Med-Chi meeting of April 17, 1936 at which Bethune
spoke was called to discuss the growing crisis facing the pro-
fession—the problem, as an article in the Canadian Medical
Association journal put it, of dollarless doctors and penniless
patients.
Doctors were beginning to understand that health and
medical care were not just professional matters, that more was
involved than just setting standards of competence for medi-
cal graduates. There were deep-seated economic problems
with political overtones. In Montreal, mortality figures for the
ten best wards of the city (best in terms of levels of rent paid)
when compared with the ten poorest wards showed a shock-
ing difference in general mortality and mortality due to tuber-
culosis, in favour of the better-off. Doctors and health workers
were discussing the problem, and Montreal doctors, like their
counterparts in other provinces were concerned, both from
their own point of view and that of the needs of the patient.
They were concerned but they certainly were not in
agreement on the solution to their problems. The April meet-
ing took the traditional form of a symposium, the subject
"Medical Economics", with various points of view repre-
sented. One hundred and twenty-eight doctors turned out for
the discussion. The three main speakers were to be doctors F.
G. Pedley, B. Cuddihy, and A.H. Gordon. Listed to take part
in the discussion were doctors Bazin and Bethune.
The lead-off speakers all recognized deficiencies in medi-
cal practice and the necessity of the trend to more organiza-
tion in the profession. All were concerned, none was radical.
705
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Dr. Pedley made a cautious, dignified presentation in support
of Health Insurance. He noted that the majority of the popu-
lation received health care largely on the basis of charity. Two
methods to rectify this situation existed: State Medicine or
Health Insurance. The trend in Canada, he felt, was towards
Health Insurance.
Dr. Cuddihy, younger, acutely conscious of "free" ser-
vices provided the sick (his speech was entitled 'The Patients
Who Do Not Come to Me"), complained that the free clinics
operated by hospitals and municipally-operated immuniza-
tion clinics were taking revenue from doctors and cutting into
their incomes. Industrial clinics "degrade the profession by
pretending to give for nothing what the practitioner charges
for," this puts the doctor in the position of appearing to sell
what should be given away. In Cuddihy's view medical ser-
vices should be paid for, wherever supplied. He felt that the
cause of the trouble in medical affairs was that the profession
had lost control of its own destiny by allowing financiers and
professional politicians to control the practice of medicine.
Proper organization could solve most of the problems; the
aim of an organized profession should be to provide adequate
medical care for the public and a suitable and moderately
comfortable living for the physician.
Dr. Gordon, a senior and highly respected doctor, argued
in favour of insurance against illness. He answered Cuddihy
in part by suggesting that doctors who provided services free
through hospital clinics were in fact fully compensated for
their energy and time. They gained experience, they asso-
ciated with the best minds in medicine, and for the hours thus
employed were kept in the atmosphere of "the priesthood of
medicine".
In the discussion which followed, Dr. Bazin agreed that
the practice of medicine was becoming too costly for the pa-
770
Bethune As I Knew Him
tient, but it was Bethune who appears to have made the
speech of the evening. At earlier Med-Chi meetings he had
spoken as a guest. This time he took part as a newly elected
associate fellow of the society.
He was determined to make the case for radical change in
the profession and had prepared material for his contribution
(later published in The Canadian Doctor for January 1937). As
always he found an original opening. He was presenting the
case of the people against the doctors. The case, he argued,
was an ethical and moral one in the fields of social and politi-
cal economics, and not simply medical economics.
Doctors were living in a capitalist society and the profes-
sion was suffering the same ills as the society in which it is
practised. Doctors are selling their services at a price the
people cannot pay, he argued, and the result is no health pro-
tection for the people and no economic security for the doc-
tors. At the same time an enormous accumulation of scientific
knowledge which no one man can grasp makes it necessary
for doctors to specialize in different branches of medicine, but
relatively few can afford to add the expense in time and
money to the heavy cost of acquiring their original degree in
medicine. And so the great fund of scientific knowledge that
exists today can only be put to use for the benefit of the
people if a system of group medicine is introduced. In his
words,
In our highly-geared modern industrial society there is
no such thing as private health, all health is public. The
illness and maladjustment of one unit of the mass affects
all other members. The protection of the people's health
should be recognized by the government as its primary
obligation and duty to its citizens.
To serve the people best, medicine must be entirely reorgan-
777
Bethune: The Montreal Years
ized and unified, welded into a great army of doctors, nurses,
technicians and social workers to make a collective attack on
disease, using accumulated scientific knowledge.
Bethune told his audience of doctors that the best way to
provide health protection would be to change the economic
system:
Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of
medicine and purify our profession of rapacious indi-
vidualism. Let us make it disgraceful to enrich ourselves
at the expense of the miseries of our fellow man. Let us
organize ourselves so that we can no longer be exploited
as we are being exploited by our politicians. Let us re-
define medical ethics, not as a code of professional eti-
quette between doctors but as a code of fundamental mo-
rality and justice between medicine and the people.
The profession must abandon its isolation and grasp the
realities of the present economic crisis. "The world", he said,
"is changing beneath our very eyes, and already the bark of
Aesculapius is beginning to feel beneath its keel the great
surge and movement of the rising world tide which is sweep-
ing on, obliterating old landscapes and old scenes. We must
go with the tide or be wrecked."
That was Bethune's conviction, speaking as a socialist,
strongly and vividly expressed. There is no record as to how
his audience reacted.
The Move to Beaver Hall Square
In the spring of 1936 Norman moved from the Fort Street
apartment to a flat on Beaver Hall Square that has always
been spoken of and written about as if it was his permanent
Montreal headquarters. In fact he only lived there for some
772
Bethune As I Knew Him
six months in 1936 until he left for Spain in October of that
year.
One afternoon he called me at the clinic to make sure that
I would drop in that day. There was never a dearth of fine
and exciting things to talk about but this seemed quite spe-
cial. He had been to see a flat on Beaver Hall Square and
was very excited about it. Changes would have to be made
but it was just what he needed. It would mean that the health
group had an address and a permanent meeting place, and it
would also mean that Brandtner and Beth had a centre for art
classes for children, on the style of Cizek, the Czech child art
experimentalist, a project that Bethune and Brandtner had
been discussing.
The new headquarters was the top flat, third floor, 1154
Beaver Hall Square. It had previously been rented to Jori
Smith, her husband Jean Palardy, and Paul Lemieux, all
painters, for use as a painting and commercial art studio, an
idea that, according to Jori, never got off the pad. The build-
ing, an old converted house, had been used by architects. In
fact the whole building had been renovated with a view to
renting to architects.
The area was attractive to artists; in the twenties, mem-
bers of the Beaver Hall group of painters had a studio in the
same row of houses and although the group had broken up
long before Norman moved there, he used to speak of Anne
Savage and Sarah Robertson as still using their studio.
The actual move to the flat was delayed because of the
changes on which Norman insisted. The window in the room
which was to be the studio had to be enlarged, the landlord
had to be persuaded to give permission, the weather had to be
warm enough to permit knocking out the wall. The whole flat
was to be renovated; Norman appreciated its possibilities and
was determined to make the most of them.
113
Bethune: The Montreal Years
He was delighted with the flat and it responded to his
delight. The large front room facing east on the square and
opening off a fairly wide hall was the studio. The children's
art classes were held there, as were our group meetings. Adja-
cent to it was the bedroom, also opening off the hall, with a
lovely view of the square from the window, a platform bed,
desk and chair.
Behind the studio was a good-sized room entered through
a door from the hall, with a fireplace and high, narrow win-
dow facing west. Next to it was the kitchen, entered from the
hall, and off it the bathroom. In the kitchen a few steps led up
to a door on to a balcony facing west where sunflowers were
planted and later growing. Paintings were hung on the wall of
the stairwell and in every room. The room behind the studio
was Norman's living room. It was painted off-white and fur-
nished with taste but very little money. A borrowed "gentian"
blue rug covered the floor, there was a built-in corner seat
with the same colour back and seat cushions, a small desk
painted off-white, and folding chairs, also off-white with blue
canvas seats. It was a lovely room. The whole flat was pleas-
ing. The bizarre effect of Fort Street had vanished, but not
without nostalgia. Norman referred to it as "among my sou-
venirs."
With the flat ready, Norman and Brandtner started art
classes for children in which Marian Scott later joined. The
purpose of the classes was not to produce future artists but to
expose the receptive minds of children to a world other than
the one they knew. Most of them came from poor environ-
ments, some from slums where there was little to see but drab,
unpainted houses, dilapidated buildings, where garbage was
piled high, filled with the odour of poverty, where their men-
tal outlook had little chance to develop. Attendance at classes
was free except for those who had a few pennies to spare.
114
Bethune As I Knew Him
Brandtner was not interested in teaching the techniques
of painting. He was more interested in awakening imagina-
tion and with it creativity. He loved to work with and for
children. When Norman left for Spain in October, 1936, Fritz
and Mieze took over the Beaver Hall Square flat and lived
there for fourteen years. The children's art classes were conti-
nued with Brandtner and Marian Scott. Brandtner also con-
ducted classes for children in public and private schools and
in hospitals. He painted murals in one of the wards of the
Children's Memorial Hospital in Montreal. Through him
thousands of children learned to see, to feel, to imagine, so
that they would be creative in their attitude towards the
world, in eagerness for life, for joy, for health and happiness
and in their hatred of war.
There were ten to fifteen children in a class, held once a
week, with a special excursion on Saturdays when possible.
Brandtner was there regularly and Norman usually in the
months before he left for Spain. There was no formal teach-
ing. The children sat on the floor with large sheets of wrap-
ping paper to paint on, and cake tins to mix their paints in,
and they painted what was in their minds.
Saturdays, Brandtner or Norman would take the children
to art galleries, to museums and to see special buildings,
things they had never seen before. They went for walks to-
gether and later at the centre the children would express
what they had seen or felt with paint on paper. The Saturday
they were to come to Montreal West for a picnic with me it
poured rain. I don't know who was more disappointed, the
children or I.
The painter Sylvia Ary, who attended these classes as a
child, recalls that the children all loved Norman, who
brought them treats, and taught them to see and feel the
things they looked at, impressions that were embedded in
775
Bethune: The Montreal Years
their minds. Brandtner was jolly, told lively stories, never the
same twice, recited poetry and played music and the children
learned a lot from him.
Once Norman had moved to the Beaver Hall Square flat,
it was no longer practical for me to drop in after my work at
the clinic. I saw him at meetings of the group, at the homes of
friends and when he would drop in to see us at home in Mont-
real West.
Norman was involved with the work of the group and the
children's art classes, to say nothing of his own work and his
interest in Marxist philosophy. His mood was happy in those
spring and summer days. He was never idle and I often
wondered how he managed to do all he did.
At times he was lonely in the Beaver Hall flat. Certainly
not during the day when there was always so much going on,
or in the evening when there were meetings to attend, visits
and parties with friends. It was when all this was over and he
returned to the empty apartment, the only living soul in the
whole building. He missed Frances, and he missed Fort Street
and the companionship of Fritz and Mieze.
To break the lonely stillness he would phone friends. I got
a number of those calls. "Have I wakened you?" he would
say, and without apology continue to talk about whatever was
on his mind, always something worth listening to. One night
it was about a Marxist class he had just returned from: "My
God, how can Marx be made so dull." Or it may have been
about a patient—had the treatment been right for her, would
she recover? And if she did, what then? Or again, it might
have been his children, as he referred to the children in the
art classes; it may have been a beautiful woman he had seen,
or a painting—whatever it was would come alive as he viv-
idly described it. His unflagging compassion for a sick person
was truly remarkable. How many had he treated? Yet each
116
Bethune As I Knew Him
one seemed to be the first and the most important. He would
describe their condition and their response or lack of it in a
way that drew his listener until you too were involved with
the patient and identified with the physician.
Among his assets were an ability to say a great deal in
very few words and a practical attitude towards decisions he
had taken that led him to translate them into immediate ac-
tion. Although he was in a happy mood, I was sure he was
doing too much and told him so. He said it was hard to stick
to his habit of sleeping after lunch and he missed it. "But," he
said, "you can do much more if you can see the direction in
which you are moving, and how wonderful it is to be with
others who are moving in the same direction."
One afternoon after a clinic at the MGH, I dropped in to
see Norman with some work I had finished in connection with
the health group. The children's art classes had broken off for
the day and Beth, who had an early evening meeting, was
beginning to prepare his meal—starting with vitamin tablets:
"How valuable they are, what did we ever do without them?
The food we buy today lacks the nutritive value of the food
we used to buy and eat, so we take the tablet as a supplement,
but one day they will learn how to make tablets with every-
thing we need and then we will walk out of the kitchen per-
fectly satisfied with a pill dissolving in our digestive tract—
no cooking, no dishes!" That little lecture came from an epi-
cure who not only could prepare the most delicate and ele-
gant meal but took delight in doing so.
Pill swallowed, he began his main dish—Fray Bentos
corn beef hash with a fried egg on top. I watched, thinking to
myself that perhaps a pill wouldn't be such a bad thing after
all. Severely he said, "Libbie, to fry an egg, you must be the
egg-"
Just as the meal was ready we heard footsteps on the stair-
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
way. Norman went to the hall to see who it was, I heard voices
and Norman with a young teenager disappeared into the bed-
room. Norman came out, called a taxi for the lad and saw him
down the stairs. As he came back to the kitchen to eat his now
cold meal, he explained that the young man had been a pa-
tient of his at the Saturday clinic for the unemployed in
Pointe St. Charles which Norman had set up with the help of
George Mooney. The boy had gonorrhoea and couldn't be
treated at home so Norman sent him off to the MGH emer-
gency. I thought as I left that I had just seen an example of
the rapport that existed between Norman and his patients.
This was early in July, and the health group was meeting
more often and regularly. We were discussing the first steps to
be taken to get our programme across in the provincial elec-
tion coming up.
Norman had already joined the Communist Party. He
knew I felt close to it but that I was not a member. One day
that spring he asked me if I was ready to join. I was not, and
did not join until later, and although I am not a member now,
I am glad to have been then, and have never regretted the
experience shared with so many. Not to have been would
have meant standing apart from what seemed and still seems
to me to have been the mainstream of political activity and
thought on the Left. Norman was not worried by my refusal.
You will come to it, he said, and I did.
About this time the artist Pegi Nicol and Norman Mac-
Leod, her future husband, were in Montreal from New York
and were staying with Bethune. Pegi painted a frieze in the
living room around the top of the back of the corner seat. It
was done in her free, spontaneous style and in the soft pale
shades of colour she was using at the time. The effect was
lovely and Norman was delighted.
Late one evening, the three of them drove to Montreal
775
Bethune As I Knew Him
West to talk to me about a party to raise funds for the Chil-
dren's Art Centre and ask me to help. The party would be the
next week! They already knew where they wanted it to be—
in a large house with nice grounds, close to the St. Lawrence
on the Lakeshore Road. It was a place that could be rented
for parties, and you could either have a caterer or provide
your own refreshments. Pegi volunteered to do lightning
sketches for five dollars a piece. Beth and Norman MacLeod
were to arrange for kegs of beer and I was to have sandwiches
made and bring them out. Other members of the health
group were to be involved.
This was in late July, and it turned out that a great many
of the people we invited were either away or going away and
the main purpose of the party—to raise funds—was frus-
trated. There was swimming and dancing, and the locale and
weather were perfect but the party—disappointing! To cap
everything Beth called the next day to tell me the beer kegs
were missing and the deposit lost.
Norman paid several visits to Toronto that summer and
on one of them Pegi Nicol introduced him to Paraskeva
Clark. Bethune was enchanted with Paraskeva and her paint-
ing. I remember the evening that Norman brought Pegi and
Norman MacLeod to our house hearing him declare that
Paraskeva was "a great artist and a great human being."
Bethune had been accustomed to taking liberties with the
paintings of Brandtner, altering a detail when it seemed to be
an improvement. Once as a house-guest of Philip and Para-
skeva Clark he undertook to change the colour of the puppet
stand in Paraskeva's famous Petrouchka from red to blue.
Paraskeva was not amused and the red was decisively re-
stored.
775
Bethune: The Montreal Years
For the Security of the People's Health
In closing his remarks to the Med-Chi Society in April, Be-
thune referred to the work of the health group, the first public
announcement of its existence, describing it simply as a group
studying schemes for the "security of the people's health",
and asking interested persons to get in touch with him. By
this time we were actively preparing material which later ap-
peared in the form of two documents from the group relating
to the Quebec provincial election of August 17, 1936.
The time had come for us to find a suitable name for our-
selves. It was not easy. I remember we spent the better part of
an evening discussing alternatives. Bethune had become en-
thusiastic about the use of "socialized medicine" as part of the
name. He had received and shown us material from the Medi-
cal League for Socialized Medicine formed in New York in
1934. The group did not agree.
Most of us felt, and Bethune came to agree, that the
people to whom we were addressing ourselves were not ready
to accept the idea of socialized medicine, however aware they
were of the chaotic state of medical practice and health care
in Montreal. We did not want to use words in the group name
that might turn away people who otherwise would have sup-
ported us. What was needed was a descriptive name, and so it
turned out to be: The Montreal Group for the Security of the
People's Health.
The name of the group appeared for the first time in the
first version of a set of proposals to the medical and related
professions sent out with a covering letter signed by Norman
on July 27. The proposals also appeared in the August issue
of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, immediately fol-
720
Bethune As I Knew Him
lowing the text of the speech made by Dr. Gordon at the
Med-Chi symposium.
The political situation in the province at the time was
tense. We were on the verge of the second provincial election
within a year. The Liberal Party had been in power for what
seemed forever but in the election of the previous November,
the Taschereau government, shaken by a series of scandals,
had narrowly avoided defeat. Taschereau resigned and
Adelard Godbout, the new Liberal premier, called another
election for August 17, 1936. As it turned out the Liberals
were defeated and the Union Nationale led by Duplessis
came to power for the first time. But in the spring and early
summer the future course of politics was unclear and the
group was anxious to bring positive health proposals before
the public.
In June, just two months before that election, as we were
working on our proposals, something new was added as far as
the public health scene in Montreal was concerned. A Medi-
cal Relief Committee was set up under the supervision of the
Montreal Unemployment Commission, a municipal body.
This was an important development. Medical care for people
on relief was a pressing problem. Any progress made came
slowly and unevenly and inadequately. Ontario provided the
only province-wide medical relief system, started in March
1935. The province provided the princely total of thirty-five
cents a month for the medical care of each person on relief.
Montreal was now setting up a city-wide scheme. It was
new, it was not what we wanted, but it had to be taken into
account and our group obviously had to deal with it. Under
the Montreal scheme the city was to create a fund for the
medical care of relief recipients amounting to twenty-five
cents a month, or three dollars a year, per patient. The total
727
Bethune: The Montreal Years
was estimated to come to just over $500,000, and of this fund
the share of the doctors would be 80 per cent and that of the
druggists 20 per cent.
We saw three problems: one was the question of the divi-
sion of funds between doctors and druggists, a second was the
amount of the fund —the group thought it should at least be
doubled—and finally, we were afraid that the scheme, in-
complete as it was (we wanted a province-wide scheme) might
not survive the election.
With these questions in mind we stated that the scheme
was a step in the right direction but should be extended to
cover the province. We also noted that in Lachine in 1935 the
actual division of relief funds for medical care had been 60
per cent to drug stores, 32 per cent to doctors and 8 per cent
to dentists. We suggested the setting-up of municipal drug
dispensaries that would take the exorbitant profits out of
filling prescriptions. Since we felt that the proposed scheme
would probably break down because of a reduction in the
amount of money available to pay the doctors, we made a
counter-proposal.
A Central Planning Board of representatives of English
and French doctors should be set up, we said. Doctors who
accepted relief payments should receive a per-capita amount
for an all-inclusive service. Of three thousand doctors in the
city, eight hundred had registered with the Unemployment
Commission. We estimated that this service could be pro-
vided at the official figure of twenty-five cents per person. If
the fund was increased to fifty cents a month per patient, as
we argued could be done without placing too great a burden
on city finances, then what we described as "a more nearly
adequate" medical, dental and nursing service could be pro-
vided, including preventive medicine. We also asked that a
722
Bethune As I Knew Him
Central Nursing Planning Board be set up to unify existing
nursing services and cut administrative costs.
The figures we were quoting on the cost of relief and the
proportion of municipal revenues going to meet relief costs
were based on a study done the previous year by Leonard
Marsh for the Dominion Conference of Mayors held that year
in Montreal. The city of Montreal was spending close to 20
per cent of its revenues on relief, Lachine 27 per cent; West-
mount and Outremont, the well-off municipalities, each 2 per
cent.
After dealing with the new Montreal situation we turned
back to our original aim: proposals for a province-wide sys-
tem of health care. We tried to cut through arguments about
the best way to improve health standards. Our suggestion was
that three alternative plans be put into operation on a trial
basis in three selected Quebec municipalities under more or
less controlled conditions—a typically pragmatic Bethune
approach, let practice decide which plan works best. A fourth
plan called for an immediate, province-wide system for the
medical care of the unemployed on a fee-for-service basis.
Plan One was a system of municipal medicine, with costs
borne by municipal taxes, and provincial grants in aid where
necessary. This we probably all felt to be the most attractive
choice, but we were quite prepared to have it put to the test of
experience. Under this plan a full-time team of doctors, dent-
ists and nurses, including all specialties, "active, keen and
highly trained men and women", should be appointed on the
basis of a "high sense of social responsibility" (and not for
political reasons). It can be seen that we were optimistic, but
not, I think, unduly so. The team, selected by a provincial
Medical Planning Board to be set up by the professional soci-
eties, would take over responsibility for the health, prevention
123
Bethune: The Montreal Years
and care of disease for an entire municipal population. They
would be provided with a small modern hospital, new or mo-
dernized. Members of the team would be on salary; no figure
was suggested but it should be borne in mind that in 1929 the
average income of all doctors in the United States was calcu-
lated at fifty dollars a week.
We described our second plan as compulsory health in-
surance. It should be tried out in a municipality with a rela-
tively homogeneous economic pattern (we didn't offer any ex-
ample) where relief recipients were at an irreducible mini-
mum. All wage-earners were to be included, regardless of in-
come. The true costs of insurance would be established and
the actuarial calculations would determine the amount of the
premium to be paid by the individual.
The third plan was a further step away from what we
thought was desirable. It was a plan for voluntary hospital-
ization or health insurance, to be tried out in a selected ur-
ban municipality of from five to ten thousand people.
The fourth plan differed from the others in that it was for
the unemployed only, was province-wide, on a fee-for-service
basis, with the cost borne by the province. The urgent need
for such a plan in Quebec was shown by the fact that Quebec,
with 12 per cent of the population of Canada, had over 31 per
cent of all employable workers on relief, and 48.7 per cent of
the unemployables, the latter "an appalling figure" that we
said should be investigated immediately.
Our document in this original form ended with an appeal
for a mass meeting to be called by the medical societies, ap-
pealing to all French and English members of the medical
and allied professions, social service workers, public health
officials, representatives of the Trades and Labour Council
and of the Federated Charities to put forward the demands of
the professions in regard to the election campaign.
124
Bethune As I Knew Him
Our approach was conciliatory, we were offering alterna-
tive plans to be tested on a trial and error basis, with immedi-
ate steps to be taken to care for the unemployed. We were not
trying to outline a system of socialized medicine.
We were in a hurry; our letter enclosing the document
was dated July 27, the elections were on August 17; we had
not allowed much time for any society to react unless its
spokesmen shared our sense of urgency.
Our document was considered newsworthy by the Ga-
zette, which carried a straightforward summary of our propos-
als on July 30 (twelve column-inches of copy). The story,
headed "Health Platforms of Parties Sought", "Group of
Doctors, Dentists and Nurses Place Ideas Before Leaders"
was friendly but not completely accurate. It referred to three
plans and did not mention plan four dealing with the unem-
ployed.
After sending out the letter, we were to call on as many
candidates as possible, get their reaction to it and encourage
them to support the mass meeting we had decided to call
ourselves. We wanted to impart our sense of urgency and ask
them to include our proposals in their platforms. I called on
Dr. Cyril Flanagan, a dentist and an alderman with progres-
sive ideas, a CCF candidate, who was a friend of George
Mooney. His sister Winnifred and I had been in the same
class at school so we were not strangers. He was friendly, and
I left with the impression that he would support the meeting
and tell others about it. That was my first attempt at cam-
paigning.
My sense of achievement lasted until the day of the meet-
ing which was to be held, at least according to my recollec-
tion, in Moyse Hall on the McGill Campus at the inauspi-
cious hour of 5 p.m. when most medical and dental people are
busiest. No one, myself included, has a clear picture of the
725
Bethune: The Montreal Years
meeting, which seems to indicate that it was not a great suc-
cess.
Strangely enough we were not discouraged and least of all
Norman. We knew we were late with our material, that there
was little time and much to do before the election, but we also
knew that we had done the preliminary work well, and the
ideas for which we were trying to rouse interest were not ex-
treme. They were part of a whole movement across Canada to
find a way to get adequate medical care for everyone and not
just for those who could pay for it. Alberta and British Co-
lumbia were already advanced in their plans, both had en-
acted health insurance legislation, but in neither province was
the legislation put into effect before the war.
The first document from our group to the medical and
allied professions was followed by a second version, enlarged
and extensively edited, intended to be used as the text of a
pamphlet entitled "Medical Care for the People of Montreal
and the Province of Quebec." As far as I know the pamphlet
was never published other than in the mimeograph form.
The second version was dated August 10, 1936, was di-
rected to the medical and allied professions as an "enlarge-
ment" of the article appearing in the current issue of the Ca-
nadian Medical Association Journal, and the recipient was asked
to give the material serious consideration. It was also sent to
all political candidates seeking election in Montreal, to Pre-
mier Godbout, to Maurice Duplessis, leader of the Opposi-
tion, as well as to Mayor Houde and aldermen, and to the
Montreal Unemployment Commission.
The action demand in the second version went beyond
the election period. It called for a Congress of medical, health
and other interested bodies, including the Trades and Labour
Council and the Church. It was to be sponsored by the
726"
Bethune As I Knew Him
French and English medical, dental and nursing associations
and would formulate plans for a united professional front.
Doctors, dentists, nurses, social service workers were
asked to join their local societies and to urge unification of
French and English-speaking doctors and related services.
The document closed with the words: "Fight racial and pro-
fessional isolation. We must unite in a common cause—
health security for our people, economic security for our-
selves." It should be noted that while our documents ex-
pressed awareness of the importance of uniting French and
English members of the professions involved, neither of our
documents was issued in French.
The revised version has one or two echoes of the platform
of the Medical League for Socialized Medicine in New York,
as indicated by tick-marks on Norman's copy of the U.S.
document. In general, however, the Montreal group docu-
ment expressed in our words the points that seemed impor-
tant to us in terms of the needs of the people of the province.
The suggestion in our document about the model kitch-
ens to be set up by the projected Relief Commission extended
the concept to include the provision of day care, (described as
"infant parking"), free movies, occupational therapy work-
shops (carpentry, shoe repair, dress-making) very much in the
terms of Norman's original Model City project.
The new version had an opening section based mainly on
Norman's Med-Chi speech of April. "Medicine as a part of
modern society presents the same contradictions in miniature
as affect the whole." It ended with answers to the question
"What's wrong with our practice of Medicine at present?"
from the points of view of the patient and the doctor.
For the patients the problem was that the great majority
of them were unable to pay for adequate medical aid, that the
727
Bethune: The Montreal Years
aid supplied by charity was inadequate, and that there was a
lack of preventive and hygienic measures in the community.
For the doctors, the problem lay in the inability to provide
services at the level made possible through scientific advance,
because of the patient's inability to pay and the relative po-
verty of the doctor.
The points raised in the first version of the document were
then repeated, re-arranged in part, with editorial changes. We
asked that extra money for medical care for relief come from
provincial funds rather than from the city. The argument on
the use of "socialized medicine" was finally resolved by a
paragraph that replaced Bethune's socialized medicine Med-
Chi argument with the words "Public Medicine": that is, "a
plan ... of public medicine on the same basis as public educa-
tion, fire protection, the army and the police force." That ex-
pressed what we all agreed to, and made it clear that our
proposals were applicable to the here and now as well as to
the future.
I have no recollection of the reaction to the second docu-
ment. The Gazette carried an editorial on August 10 headed
"Public Health Assistance" which asked why so little progress
was being made towards the general welfare, in spite of the
increased skill of the medical professions, the advance in
medical science and the diffusion of medical knowledge. The
root cause the writer felt was the economic conditions of the
masses. Compulsory health insurance should be considered; a
study of the problem is being made in Montreal by a group of
doctors, dentists and nurses. The writer avoided referring to
our group by name, and repeated the mistake about our
"three" plans.
Bethune went on collecting references to efforts to im-
prove health conditions until he left for Spain two months
725
Bethune As I Knew Him
after the election. Clippings in his files for October 9, two
short weeks before he sailed for Spain, bring together his in-
terests of the time. In Toronto, the president of the Ontario
Medical Association had just declared that 2.5 million people
in Ontario out of a total population of 3.5 million could not
avail themselves of the "vast mountains of knowledge pos-
sessed by the physicians of the Province"; in Madrid the
Spanish government had announced that a Scottish Red
Cross ambulance unit serving the Loyalists had been bombed
in broad daylight by the planes of General Franco; in Winni-
peg one thousand single unemployed declared their willing-
ness to aid the Spanish government against the Fascist insur-
gents and asked the government of Mackenzie King to pro-
vide them with free transportation there.
Will You Come?
Events in Spain became of great concern. The uprising
against the Popular Front government (the Loyalists) by
Franco and the Fascist generals in command of the Spanish
army in Africa, with the help of Hitler and Mussolini, had
begun on July 18, 1936. We were all shocked at the attack on
an elected government and Bethune felt that the fate of the
world was being decided in Spain.
I had gone away in August with my family for a month,
and I heard that Norman was on his way to Spain only after
he had left Montreal, but I was not surprised. To me it was
perfectly logical that he should go, and that once having
made his decision he would act on it quickly and directly.
The news of his departure was announced only a few days
before he left, judging from newspaper accounts. The Daily
Clarion which had earlier carried an announcement that Gra-
725
Bethune: The Montreal Years
ham Spry, editor of the CCF New Commonwealth, was plan-
ning a national drive to raise funds for a 200-bed hospital for
Spain, ran a headline on October 22: "Famous Canadian
Doctor Heads Spain Unit". The Gazette carried a front-page
story on October 24: "Dr. N. Bethune leaves for Madrid,
Heads Canadian Medical Mission", in which Bethune, spon-
sored by the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, stated
that six doctors including two French-Canadian Roman Ca-
tholics were ready to co-operate in setting up a 200-bed hospi-
tal. The same day the Gazette carried news of riots in Mont-
real that had prevented a Spanish government delegation
from speaking as planned.
Before leaving Montreal Norman made his will and dis-
posed of all his property. Everything was to go to his former
wife, now Frances Coleman. I had first met Frances at the
home of mutual friends. Frances was attractive, cool and se-
rene, but I found her manner a little heavy, giving the impres-
sion of joining in the discussion from a desire to be polite,
rather than from interest.
The second and last time we met was at a supper party
held at the Scandinavian club to raise funds for the Canadian
League Against War and Fascism. It was of course an infor-
mal affair in casual dress, skirts and sweaters for the women.
Norman arrived with Frances, who was wearing a long black
velvet dress, red roses at the V of its low neckline. The effect
was quite stunning. After supper Beth danced only with
Frances.
Even after their second divorce and her marriage, Nor-
man still felt protective and possessive towards her and still
referred to her as his wife. Under the will she was left the flat
at 1154 Beaver Hall Square, with all its contents, his account
at the Royal Bank, St. Matthew Street branch, and he gave
her a power of attorney. The famous roadster was sold to Hy
130
Bethune As I Knew Him
Shister, who was to pay Frances twenty-five dollars a month
for twelve months.
Fritz and Mieze Brandtner took over the Beaver Hall
Square flat and furniture from Norman, paying Frances the
rent of $42.50 a month, less fifty cents for garbage disposal.
In leaving, Norman wrote to Fritz Brandtner ac-
knowledging his responsibility as a founder of the Children's
Creative Art Centre to contribute to its support for four
months beginning November 1, 1936, but he would not conti-
nue his support if the centre was not self-supporting by that
time. A committee consisting of Marian Scott, Sonia Apter
and Frances Coleman, was to look for a sponsor for the move-
ment. If for any reason Frances wished to dispose of the flat,
or the Brandtners wished to leave, the agreement between
them could be terminated by one month's notice.
Norman sent me his photograph from Spain, as he did to
many of his friends, autographed, and dated 1, 2, 37. In
March, I received a letter that included his description of the
evacuation of Malaga and the dreadful trek of thousands of
men, women and children refugees to Almeria.
People ask me what I thought of Bethune in those days, and
the answer is that I thought of him as a compassionate, bril-
liant surgeon, a witty, stimulating friend.
I had known him for close to a year, a year that made a
very deep impression on me. Our convictions brought us to-
gether, we were moving in the same direction politically,
surely there could be no better basis for friendship.
A favorite quote of his—from Walter Pater, a nineteenth-
century English aesthete—throws some light on Beth's goals
in life: "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to
maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
He was a revolutionary in every sense; he never accepted
131
Bethune: The Montreal Years
the status quo in his life or his profession and when Marxism
became clear to him as a philosophy of change, he became a
Communist with a sense of direction for his activities and the
use of his professional skills.
He was a sensuous person with rare good taste. He liked
good food and wine. Colour and cloth when good to see or
feel gave him pleasure. He loved women—not all women—
but those whom he liked looking at or talking to. He hated
poverty, material and spiritual; it was ugly, was not a part of
life and must be overcome.
His unconventional life has been emphasized and stories
of highly unusual behaviour abound—some of them, one sus-
pects, growing in the telling. By the standards of respectabil-
ity in the medical profession of those days he was unconven-
tional; by the standards of today his behaviour then would be
more or less normal. To those of us who were his friends it was
all part of the scene, neither conventional nor unconven-
tional, just the man as he was, as much a part of him as were
his great achievements and his determination to fight fascism
as the worst disease of our time, wherever he could do it best.
There are many vivid memories: a bouquet of yellow and
orange garden flowers bought at a market to leave at my
house on his way home from Sacre-Coeur , gifts of a Russian
doll to my little daughter and an American Indian hatchet for
my sou.
I remember of course the Norman who was contemptuous
of and could be furiously angry with those who could not or
would not see beyond the "establishment", who was intoler-
ant of mediocrity, smugness and hypocrisy.
After his letter from Spain I had no further word from
him and did not see him until October, 1937, the day before
he was to leave Montreal for New York and then Vancouver
and China. I had moved to Oxenden Avenue in a central
132
Bethune As I Knew Him
area of Montreal near McGill University. Norman tele-
phoned and said he would like to come in for tea. We talked
about mutual friends and interests as though there had been
no unusual lapse of time since we last met. He asked me if his
photograph and letter had reached me and if I had written to
him. This was the only reference to time and distance.
After tea we drove in his car to the reservoir on Pine Ave-
nue, not far away, where we got out and stood looking over
the city, picking out familiar sites and buildings. Norman
commented that he felt as if he was in limbo in an unreal
world.
He told me he was taking a medical team to China, in-
cluding a nurse, Jean Ewen, and the team was to leave in a
couple of months. Would I come too? I could join them in
Vancouver. It was hard to say no, but I had to. We said good-
bye. He took me home and as he drove off we waved to each
other. I never saw him again.
133
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those per-
sons who allowed me to interview them about their memories
of Norman Bethune and of Montreal in the Thirties, and in
particular to old friends who spent hours with me reinforcing
my memory of events and the sequence in which they took
place.
I am grateful to the staff at the Robarts Library, Univer-
sity of Toronto, where I made use of the microfilm facilities,
the stacks and material in the Fisher Room. I also used mate-
rial at the McLennan Library, McGill University, the Na-
tional Library and the Public Archives in Ottawa.
I am deeply indebted to Dr. E.H. Bensley, Medical Histo-
rian at the Osier Library, McGill, who gave me access to the
minutes of Med-Chi society meetings attended by Bethune,
and to Miss Marilyn Fransiszyn, also of the Osier Library,
who is in charge of their Bethune collection, the most easily
accessible source for the texts of Bethune's articles and
speeches in Canada.
With the kind permission of Ted Allan I was able to con-
sult material relating to Bethune at the Baldwin Room, Me-
tropolitan Toronto Library.
For material on the Thirties in Montreal I consulted the
files of the Gazette, Le Devoir, and the Daily Clarion. The fol-
lowing books and documents were also very useful: Social
Planning for Canada by the Research Committee of the
League for Social Reconstruction (1935), the Submission of the
Communist Party of Canada to the Royal Commission on Domin-
ion-Provincial Relations (1938), Health and Unemployment by
L.C. Marsh in collaboration with A.G. Fleming and C.F.
Blackler (1938) and Canadian Painting in the Thirties by
Charles C. Hill.
134
PART THREE
Comrade Beth
Stanley Ryerson
The Other Montreal
The "Montreal Years": a space, a time. City at the confluence
of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, rivers of the fur-trade
and the timber-trade, waters from the Great Lakes and from
the pays d'en haut, the great North West. The Beaver Hall hill,
gathering place (and roistering place) of the fur-lords of the
Nor'west Company, overlooking the harbour. La rue du Fort,
farther up the flank of Mont-Royal, where the round stone
martello towers of the Gentlemen of Saint-Sulpice, seigneurs of
the island of Montreal, still mark their ancient positions of
defence against "Iroquois incursion". Beaver Hall and Fort
Street, in the city of Scots and English merchants, the Mont-
real of the Victorian and Edwardian eras with the stately rows
of residences along Dorchester and Sherbrooke streets, and
Sir Hugh Allan's lofty mansion overlooking all the rest—this
was one part of the milieu in which Bethune lived and
worked: "English Montreal" ... McGill and the Royal Victo-
ria and the Sun Life (one of the few tall buildings of the time);
the head offices of the CPR; Sir Herbert Holt, Sir William
Van Home, Lord Strathcona, Sir Edward Beatty and Lord
Atholstan—institutions, personages, power.
But "below the Hill", to the south and far to the east,
Vautre Montreal, that other world of the French-Canadian
workers and "little people"—les gagne-petits, who work in the
big plants of Macdonald Tobacco, Dominion Textile,
137
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Vickers, the CPR Angus Shops; those who drive the calkhes
and the trundling tramways, les petits chars ... and whose
elites, from the Archbishop's Palace to the homes of Outre-
mont and Cote-des-Neiges, the homes of the Dandurands
and Beaubiens and the Beiques and Rollands, are respectful
allies of the Anglo-oligarchs.
In Verdun and Pointe St. Charles, old-country English
workers and Irish navvies and, in mid-town, around St.
Lawrence-Main, the East European immigrants, Jewish
needle-trades workers, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians. On
the hospital wards of the Royal Victoria (the "Vic") and the
Women's General and Sacre-Coeur and the Children's Me-
morial and the General, the 1930s Quebec statistics for TB
and malnutrition and infant mortality translate into the dis-
proportionate quotas of pain and death that are the allotment
of the labouring poor.
Montreal-metropolis: zone of intersecting structures of
power-by-enrichment. Streets named for colonial Governors:
Dorchester, Craig, Sherbrooke, Aylmer; companies named
for the owners: Redpath, Ogilvys, Warden King, Bagg's,
Morgan's. Alongside, the Quebec majority presence: the Par-
ish Church of Notre-Dame, the Cathedrale Saint-Jacques
(now Marie Reine-du-Monde), l'Oratoire Saint-Joseph,
PUniversite de Montreal on Saint-Denis below St. Cather-
ine ... and streets named for rebels! — Delorimier, Sanguinet,
Papineau.
In the 1930s, memory of past moments of revolt merged
with new voices of dissent, new undercurrents of radical
anger. Mass unemployment, wage-cuts, generalized insecu-
rity: the economic crisis meant punishment for poverty. It
incited questioning (read: "sedition") and repression of such
questioning (read: "law and order"). Workers and farmers
and middle-class professionals, old people and young, women
138
Comrade Beth
and men—all were living a time of turmoil, of a calling-in-
question of institutions of power and property and work. The
"clients" of social case-work, the children of working-class
families, the patients in and out of hospital and clinic, bore
witness to the monied heartlessness of a system. The Sir Her-
bert Holts and Sir Edward Beatties, the Beaubiens and Bronf-
mans and Redpaths continued to reap the harvest of profit
that the Royal Commission on Price Spreads (1935-36) was to
document: its figures on wage levels and hours and conditions
of work left little doubt as to the intimate connection between
the unearned surplus of profit and the exploitation of labour.
It was the delicate adjustment of the profit-rate that (then as
now) ruled the fluctuations in employment. And joblessness
and sickness, slum-living and starvation pay (when pay there
was, and work), compounded the brutal equation of the "law
of motion" of capital accumulation. Here were to be found
the roots of social, class antagonism and the imperatives of
struggle. Rosemount and Verdun, Saint-Henri and Pointe St-
Charles, Hochelaga and Park Extension: the geography of
social relations laid bare the cash and class nexus of "free
enterprise", dominated from the stately homes of Westmount
and Outremont, and the great corporations and chartered
banks of "la rue Saint-Jacques".
Conflicting currents of reform or radical opinion were be-
coming discernible in those days, cutting across the groupings
of language or nationality. There were those whose response
to unemployment was to organize the unemployed for
struggle: for "work or wages!" and for unemployment insur-
ance ("non-contributory", first demanded in April 1931).
Tory Prime Minister R.B. Bennett's answer to that audacity
was to crush subversion with what he himself called "the iron
heel of ruthlessness". Most active on the Left, the Commun-
ists who organized unemployed workers' protest were
139
Bethune: The Montreal Years
promptly jailed: speakers at a meeting in the Labour Temple
on la rue St. Dominique. Leslie Morris, Philippe Richer, Fred
Rose, T. Miller, sentenced to Bordeaux jail for two years, for
"sedition"; the leaders of the Communist Party of Canada,
"the Eight" (including Tim Buck, Sam Carr, Tom Ewen, and
Matthew Popovich), to five years in the Kingston "Pen".
Their forebears were the militant socialists who had wel-
comed Keir Hardie to Montreal on his visit prior to the Great
War, and had formed the first Parti Ouvrier at the turn of the
century. There were those from Britain, like Alex Gauld and
Michael Buhay, and from Central and Eastern Europe (not a
few of whom had known class and national struggles at the
level of civil war)—Sidney Sarkin, Fred Rose and many
others. There were women leaders, organizers, teachers such
as Bella Gauld, co-founder with Annie Buller and Beckie Bu-
hay of the Montreal Labour College. Its counterpart was the
Universite Ouvriere led by Albert Saint-Martin, Gaston Pi-
Ion, Abel and Emile Godin; such French-Canadian trade-
union militants as Charles Ouimet and Evariste Dube,
longshoremen; Leo Lebrun, municipal "outside" worker
and Bernadette Lebrun, with Gervais and Paquette and
Berthe Caron and Paul Delisle, founder-builders of the Com-
munist party among the French-Canadians. All these were
among the Montrealers who had built the Left that Bethune
would come to know. Outlawed under Section 98 of the
Criminal Code from 1931 to 1935, soon to be proscribed and
hounded under the "Padlock Law" (1937-57), banned under
the War Measures Act (1939-40 to 1942), the Communist and
non-communist Left was firmly outside the pale of "respect-
able society". It tended to be seen (and in a sense almost saw
itself) as a European revolutionary enclave within Canadian
society. "Foreign agitators!"—or, rather, voices of social con-
science?
140
Comrade Beth
Quebec (like Spain) had known the centuries-old sway of
the temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church, the
greatest land-owner in New France, and still no mean eco-
nomic and socio-political force in the province. Corporatism,
repression, and anticommunist hysteria: this formula of the
Right struck the dominant chord in Quebec's clerical-conser-
vative chorus. Voices of democratic dissent were all but si-
lenced when the rightist Duplessis led the Union Nationale to
power in 1936, his proclaimed mission being to "wage war
without mercy" against all "foreign enemies, all radicals who
threaten democracy, especially the Communists paid by Mos-
cow to implant in our province a political ideology contrary
to our religious beliefs, our traditions and our laws." A later
Union Nationale pamphlet was to claim: "All Maurice Du-
plessis' achievements since 1936 have tended to bring to-
gether the different classes of society and to cause social jus-
tice to reign, as recommended by the Holy See as an antidote
to Communism."
Hardly surprising was the rejection of priestly authority
by Catholics whose gnawing doubts about the ties of Church
and business were turning to outright opposition that often
took the form of a fervent anti-clericalism. In Montreal, under
the influence of the anti-clerical socialist Albert Saint-Martin,
there grew up an Association Humanitaire of those who had
abjured the Catholic faith: allied with the Universite
Ouvriere at Montcalm and St. Catherine Streets, it claimed
at one time a membership of four thousand. The French-Ca-
nadian communists in Montreal were critical of this anti-cleri-
cal trend. They counterposed to Saint-Martin's anti-religious
diatribes (lectures on the "Immaculate Conception" and the
like) proposals for united action in support of the demands of
the unemployed; to which Saint-Martin's rejoinder was to ad-
vocate at most a Ghandi-like policy of passive resistance.
141
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Even among the militant francophone radicals, however,
the trace of an earlier ex-Catholic aversion to the robes noires
remained. Romeo Duval, tireless organizer of the unem-
ployed and a devoted Communist, driving along the winding
"Back River" Boulevard Gouin, once startled his passenger
(and not only him) by a sudden violent swerve and accelera-
tion as he zeroed in on a black-garbed rtvtrend pere crossing
the road in front of us. The near-victim jumped for his life,
successfully. To my shocked query, 'Won, matspourquoi que t'as
faitga", Romeo replied off-handedly, "Jefais toujoursga. C'est
plus fort que moi". He always did it when he got the chance:
irrisistible\ I later related this anecdote to a visitor from Spain,
a pilot in the Loyalist Republican air force, who had come to
Canada to campaign for support. We were just then driving
past the new Universite de Montreal on the northern flank
of Mount Royal; it reminded him of Madrid's Cite Universi-
taire, then being bombarded by the Fascist besiegers. After
passing the Oratoire Saint-Joseph and a few of the great semi-
naries, our visitor remarked that it wouldn't be hard to ima-
gine a revolutionary fury one day in clerical Quebec that
would see priests hanging from every second lamp post! For
Andre Malraux, reflecting thus on clerical-fascist Spain and
clerical-conservative Quebec, the parallel seemed not too far-
fetched. The Right, with Mayor Adhemar Raynault acced-
ing to the threat of violence offered by clerical-nationalist stu-
dents, had just engineered cancellation of the Mount-Royal
Arena where Malraux was to have spoken. (A Protestant
church on Dorchester Street West was to provide the much-
reduced alternative). On more than one such occasion stu-
dent torchlight parades marched on city streets declaiming,
"A bas les Juifs! A bas le Communisme!" (Some thirty years
later, mass parades of francophone and anglophone college
142
Comrade Beth
students were to carry banners that read: "Etudiants et ou-
vriers, solidarity.
1
")
The several hundred Communists in Quebec in the mid-
1980s were busy people. Their activities included organizing
the unemployed, supporting strikes against wage-cuts and or-
ganizing the unorganized into unions, civil liberties and "lab-
our defence", and work to arouse awareness of the nature of
the fascist threat and its link with the danger of a new world
war. This, not only in the teeth of punitive repression by the
state, but despite the resistance of the official trade-union con-
servatism of the American Federation of Labor, which refused
to countenance strikes, claiming they could not be waged suc-
cessfully under depression conditions—a claim repeatedly re-
futed in action by the militant, left-led Workers' Unity
League.
In those years of an economic crisis which only world-
wide war was to "overcome", the organizing of workers'
struggles against unemployment, mass deprivation and hu-
miliation, soup-kitchen and "pogey" and police-baton attack
merged with the efforts to achieve unity against fascism and
war. Such at least was the way the Left perceived the sense of
the times we were living through.
Time can move with unconscionable slowness—or turn
hurricane. The middle and late thirties were years of the latter
sort. The threat of oncoming war, the bestial madness of Hit-
lerian fascism, combined to heighten social-political con-
sciousness in Canada with a sense of well-nigh unbearable
urgency. A world in agonizing turmoil was sweeping onward
in ways that caught up all manner of men and women in the
midst of their "ordinary lives" and lent to some a wholly new
143
Bethune: The Montreal Years
sense of direction, purposefulness, and often no mean cour-
age.
In the context of its deepest crisis, world capitalism was
engendering war. Starting with the invasion of Manchuria by
militarist-imperial Japan (1931), and on through Nazidom
taking power in Germany (1933), Fascist Italy's war on Abys-
sinia (1935), Japan's invasion of China proper (1937), and the
Nazi-Fascist assault on Republican Spain (1936-39)—the
world was lurching toward the precipice. It was in response to
this pattern of threatening disaster that the Comintern Con-
gress in August, 1935, projected the policy of the united
working class and people's front. Its application in Canadian
conditions was outlined in a Communist Party pamphlet enti-
tled Toward a Canadian People's Front. The copy that was in
Bethune's possession bears his book marker: "This Book be-
longs to Norman Bethune and his Friends."
Against the onslaught of fascism and the threat of a sec-
ond world war, movements of united action took shape, lead-
ing to People's Front governments in France and Spain
(1936), and antifascist, antiwar and anti-imperialist groupings
in many countries, our own included. Two contemporaneous
national people's wars in Spain and China from 1936-37 on-
ward posed for anti-fascists everywhere a challenge of support
and solidarity.
Collective security for peace against fascist aggression, as
proposed by the U.S.S.R. to the Western capitalist democra-
cies, was never to become a reality. The interests of big busi-
ness imperialism in the West, aiming for a bloc with the Axis
against "Bolshevism", had the upper hand. Instead of collec-
tive security, war between the imperialist countries erupted in
1939 over the issue of hegemony within the capitalist world.
Only in 1941 were the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., under attack by
the Axis powers, forced into war. A new strategic alignment
144
Comrade Beth
thereby emerged, of which the battlefields of Spain and
People's China proved to have been the prelude.
Today, in retrospect, the 1930's policy of the united front
against fascism is vehemently called in question by some on
the extreme Left who see in it a departure from "revolution-
ary class positions": antifascism as an opportunist substitute
for class struggle. That's not the way we saw it. Organizing
workers' unity in action as the base for a broad alliance to
resist Fascism and war was the class struggle in the real con-
text of the epoch. The fascist Axis of Berlin, Rome, Tokyo,
was the core of big business counter-revolution on the inter-
national arena, the polarized concentration of all that was
most reactionary on earth. That its proclaimed aim was to
"destroy Bolshevism", and that this aim was congenial to the
reactionary ultra-Right in the Western countries (hence, "ap-
peasement"), expressed the class character and objectives of
the Axis powers. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1941, the stated view of the Cana-
dian prime minister was, "Let them destroy each other!" But
the underlying relation of forces compelled belated adoption
of the Soviet-Western alliance. The inter-imperialist contra-
dictions had erupted in 1939; the new alignment did not
mean that they had dissolved into thin air. They were to reas-
sert the reactionary essence of capitalist power in the Cold
War, and after.
Bethune Makes His Choice
Bethune joined the Communist party in Montreal in Novem-
ber 1935. The visit to the Soviet Union that August, followed
by intense discussions on his return with old as well as new
acquaintances about socialism and communism, acted as cata-
lyst. A profound change in outlook had been for some time in
145
Bethune: The Montreal Years
the making: born of the conflict, long sensed and now ever
more clearly perceived, between the meaningfulness of his
chosen work as a medical practitioner and the profiteering
private enterprise society in crisis that made health and hu-
man life into expendables, and blocked all progress.
The precise date (and even the place) of Bethune's joining
the Communist party has long been something of a puzzle.
His biographers have mistakenly placed it either in the spring
of 1936 (Roderick Stewart), or in 1937, between Spain and
China, "when passing through Toronto" (Allan and Gordon).
The report of a memorial meeting in the Montreal Gazette of
Dec. 21, 1939, includes the following:
A letter of tribute was'read from Stanley Ryerson, secre-
tary of the Quebec division of the Communist party. Dr.
Bethune, the letter stated, had joined the Communist
party in 1935.
The correct date was indeed November, 1935: a fact that I
was able to re-confirm just recently, thanks to a communica-
tion from a one-time fellow-member of the party club to
which Bethune belonged.
For a middle-class Anglo-Canadian professional to join
the Left in the Montreal of the mid-thirties was to make a
drastic break with past and present associates, relationships,
and structures of authority. It was also to make a political
choice between two main trends: the "moderate", reformist,
social-democratic wing—represented by the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation—or the Communist Party. Be-
thune had come to know some of the CCF members who were
active in the League for Social Reconstruction, an educa-
tional and research group with a Fabian socialist-reform out-
look. Among them were McGill professors Leonard Marsh
and Frank Scott. Marsh, a social scientist, was author of Cana-
146
Comrade Beth
dians in and out of work and of a study on health and social
conditions. Scott taught constitutional law and was, with
Marsh, one of the editors of Social Planning for Canada, a de-
servedly influential book. A number of CCF supporters, in-
cluding trade-unionists such as Jack Cappello and Bill Long,
took an active part in civil liberties and peace movements.
But for the most part the leading CCF spokesmen showed
extreme reluctance to be in any way associated with militant
working-class action. Their response to proposals for joint ac-
tion by the unemployed movement and left groups tended to
run like this: We feel that our small group in the House of
Commons will secure measures of reform. Demonstrations
only invite violence, and that we cannot and will not condone.
For Bethune, who was horrified and furious on witnessing,
quite by chance, a brutal Montreal police attack on unem-
ployed demonstrators, the choice between reformist gradual-
ism and revolutionary struggle was not to remain long in
doubt. Class realities were becoming only too clear. His even-
tual decision, in line with both his temperament and his politi-
cal instinct, was to join the Communists.
With its traditional and strongly predominant working-
class composition, the Canadian Communist party at the time
numbered few intellectuals in its membership. But by 1935 its
gradual growth among the militant unemployed and workers
in industry, whose struggles the Workers Unity League had
been leading, was extending its influence to wider circles.
Office and professional workers were being recruited, and the
movement was growing among young people. The Canadian-
born were beginning to outnumber the immigrant workers
who from the start had made up the main body of member-
ship. So by the end of 1935, there were new sections of the
party organization in Montreal, one made up of units (clubs)
of clerical and office workers, another of professionals. Terri-
147
Bethune: The Montreal Years
torial groupings of clubs, and in a few instances factory-indus-
trial ones, comprised the "section", of which there were about
a dozen. Coordinating these were the city or district commit-
tee. With small groups in Quebec City and Trois-Rivieres,
the Quebec provincial organization was almost wholly
confined to Montreal.
English-speaking and national-minority groups made up
perhaps three-quarters of the membership. The couple of
hundred French-Canadian members were a young but very
active minority, with wide connections and leadership po-
sitions in the unemployed movement and in the Universite
Ouvriere. The death of Paul Delisle, an outstanding worker-
organizer and editor of La Vie Ouvriere, a year earlier, had
been a severe loss. Younger activists like Evariste Dube, Lu-
cien Dufour, Berthe Caron, Jean Bourget, Philippe Richer,
Bernadette Lebrun, and Henri Gagnon were coming to the
fore. Fred Rose, the district organizer, and Sidney Sarkin,
leader of the left wing in the Amalgamated Clothing workers
and director of trade-union work, were the most experienced
and senior leading members. My responsibility was that of
education director, and assistant editor of the new paper,
Clarte. Paul Moisan, and then Jean Peron, was the editor. In
the spring of 1936 I was elected secretary of the provincial
committee.
When the question of Dr. Norman Bethune's application
for membership in the party came to be dealt with, it was
assumed that he would be assigned to a club in the "closed",
professional section. The reason for this practice was the fact
that an "open" membership could very well lead to blacklist-
ing and loss of job— a serious setback not only for person and
family, but for his or her ability to do effective political work
in the profession and the community. This consideration ap-
plied also to membership in factory groups in the large mono-
148
Comrade Beth
poly-controlled industries; and in certain cases to work in
united-front organizations such as the anti-war movement.
Here, and in community work generally, the fact of a person's
not divulging membership might well lend ground to a
charge of "sailing under false colours"; but this had to be
weighed against the fact that Red-baiting and ingrained
prejudice often made concealment the only viable alternative
to political isolation, and even the only way whereby the real
and more urgent issues could be raised and publicly dis-
cussed. However debatable this approach may have been, it
has to be seen in the context of political repression such as
Section 98 of the federal criminal code and the Padlock Law.
(The fact that forty years later there are people once involved
in the Party who even now do not feel able to permit their
being quoted by name is noteworthy.)
A corollary of this "security" aspect was that of the new
member's integration in one or another party group. It was
thought that Bethune's temperament, with outspokenness as
a prime ingredient, might make membership in a closed
group difficult. An individual, non-publicized "membership-
at-large" was considered, pending further discussion. For a
start, his work on the project of public health care of which he
was a prime mover (the Montreal Group for the Security of
the People's Health), combined with participation in a Marx-
ist study group, constituted Bethune's initial assignments as a
party member.
On the Left, Bethune found new friendships. They were
unlike the old in that these were people with a common out-
look and sense of direction, and (often, but not always) a
closeness born of common activity carried on under a certain
danger of repression, at a time of historic tensions on a world
wide scale. I will name just a few of them. There were co-
workers in the Group for the Security of the People's Health,
149
Bethune: The Montreal Years
including Libbie Park and those of whom she has written; the
Kon family and others active in the Friends of the Soviet
Union; Rosalind and Gordon McCutcheon and others in the
League against War and Fascism, with Miriam Kennedy,
Donna and Norman Lee, soon to become the initiators and
tireless, quietly effective workers for the Committee to Aid
Spanish Democracy; painter Allan Harrison, creator of su-
perb posters and other visual "messagery"; the members of
his party club, and of the study group, and how many more
... They drew inspiration from Bethune, were exasperated
with him at moments, and provided a matrix of warmth and
affectionate understanding that surely played no small part in
his last short but crucial years of a new political existence in
Montreal.
Sidney Sarkin, a worker-leader of the Party, recalls the
impression Bethune, as a new member, made on him:
It was the intensity of the look he gave you when you
met him first. Summing you up. I felt, here is a man
who'd be impatient with any nonsense As I got to
know him it seemed there were two sides to his make-up
—a gentleness, a warm, patient concern—and some-
times an impatience that could turn quickly to terrible
anger. Above all, you felt his ability to focus on the one
key issue. Once he had it diagnosed, he put everything
into the fight to solve it. By golly, a fighter!
The involvement of this middle-class professional in the
working-class movement meant the meeting of an intellectual
with workers on a wholly new footing. On both sides it en-
gendered deep respect. It was this new relationship that made
itself felt in the "change of mind" that the coming to Marx-
ism entailed, as it did in the working through of the tension
750
Comrade Beth
between individual assertion and collective action, in the
course of struggle.
I was privileged to be present in some measure at this
encounter, as education director of the Party and one asso-
ciated with the professional section. I was then teaching at Sir
George Williams College, and there were areas of concern
that I soon found to be of common interest to us both.
"A Natural Dialectic"
As far as I can recall, it was in the autumn of 1935, at the
home of friends living in the Cote-des-Neiges area of Mont-
real, that I first met Norman Bethune. If our primary com-
mon concern was with matters of Marxism in practice and
theory, a personal factor helped deepen my appreciation of
the kind of man he was. My father too was a surgeon, with a
strong commitment to medicine as a social service: he de-
tested the "private business" side of medical practice, which
he had early abandoned for teaching and hospital work. He,
also, had served overseas in the "Great War".
In a study group that I conducted in the winter of
1935-36 which Bethune attended, what impressed me particu-
larly was his strong bent for seizing upon interrelations of the
practical and the theoretical: a sort of instantaneous insight, a
"natural dialectic". Interconnection, interaction, the drive to
"see life clearly and see it whole", a readiness to leap over
"established" barriers: I was reminded of my father's impa-
tience with closed, isolated compartments within and among
academic disciplines. In medical education my father used to
inveigh against the way each of the specialists in, say, his-
tology and endocrinology and pathology would load their
students with mountainous assignments as though no other
757
Bethune: The Montreal Years
subject counted, or indeed existed. (My otherwise decidedly
conservative and conventional parent, in this insistence on
the related wholeness of areas of study and of reality, had a
distinct sense of the dialectical. It was to lead him later to
move towards a concept of positive health and of social medi-
cine sharply at odds with the socio-medical status quo.)
Among occupations, there are some that stand especially
close to the fundamentals of birth, living and growing, death.
The doctor or health-worker and the teacher are two such.
Their apprenticeship and practice involve a special, "privi-
leged" relationship with persons. For one thing, the pupil and
the patient are in each individual case somehow unique, at
the same time as they are generic, part of some social common
denominator. Bethune, whether as teacher of medicine or as
practitioner, as organizer of health-protection or iconoclast,
grasped early the nature of interacting interconnections. He
had early become well aware of societal pathology as en-
gendering the conditions of physical and mental sickness.
Experience had deepened his insight into the intolerable con-
tradiction between the steady growth of medical science and
technology, and the pervasive poverty of working people
which nullified the efforts of health workers: society outside
constantly recreating the very sickness and ill-health that sci-
ence had learned to overcome within the hospital or clinic.
His anger at this futile, frustrating paradox, at the nonsensi-
cal wickedness of the existing set-up became part of him; and
cutting ruthlessly through the self-serving arguments and ob-
fuscation of the medical establishment, he came out for "so-
cialized medicine". So when he encountered the concept of
dialectics as the "science of interconnection" (Engels), as
conflict and unity of opposites, as at once process and struc-
ture in movement, he practically shouted his delight at the
recognition of things long sensed and now set forth in a fuller,
752
Comrade Beth
more meaningful frame of understanding: one that both em-
braced the world and illuminated the dynamic immediacy of
thought and action that was so congenial to his character.
Another, related side of Bethune's cast of mind and of his
activity that I came to appreciate particularly was the com-
bining of intense interest in both science and art. His creativ-
ity partook of both. The urge to universality that Frederick
Engels deals with in his superb Introduction to the Dialectics
of Nature was illustrated in the Bethune temperament—and
temper. To the conventional-dull and philistine-complacent,
the creative spirit reacts with rebelliousness, with an urge to
shock (ipater le bourgeois). But to a society that is not only
vulgar Babbittry on the surface but wholly evil within, crush-
ing out creativity and fostering suffering, the enlightened art-
ist-scientist will respond with righteous fury. For Bethune,
this was the difference between bohemian gesture and revolu-
tionary dedication: between theatrical posturing and
affirmation of life. He appreciated and enjoyed the Russian
philosopher George Plekhanov's essay on the nineteenth cen-
tury artist and society, explaining bohemian protest and the
imperatives of its transcendence. And by the same author
(Lenin's first mentor), the study on the role of the individual
in history. An intensely individual Bethune was learning, as
he read Marxian social philosophy, to appreciate a new rela-
tionship with living history: one that he was to be challenged
to enact in his own person within a matter of months, and for
the some few years remaining.
The study group that Bethune attended intermittently
during the winter of 1936 was organised in an informal sort of
way, not as part of the Communist Party itself, although in-
cluding people from "Section 13" (the closed one). Health
and social workers, school teachers, accountants and artists
were among those who attended at one point or another.
153
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Meetings were held at different members' homes in turn, and
were not publicized. The party was of course an illegal organ-
ization in the years 1931-1936 (under Section 98 of the federal
criminal code), then in 1937-1956 (Quebec, "Law respecting
communistic propaganda") and in 1939-1942 (the War Mea-
sures Act).
In the study group there was discovery. What Old Karl
had penned in Volume One of Capital, published in 1867
("That year!") was a penetrating case history and diagnosis of
our sick society, whose alternating chills and fever appeared
now in the long depression to have taken on a chronic and
seemingly incurable persistence. Nothing would "help", it ap-
peared, but a medieval blood-letting on a ghastly, cosmic
scale; and the leeches fattening, with war spreading on three
continents, bore names ... Vickers and Nobel and Thyssen,
Dupont and Schneider-Creusot, and in Spain one Juan
March, multimillionaire backer of the fascist Falange.
The sessions were sometimes led by Fred Rose, provincial
party organizer, or Emery Samuel, French-Canadian section
organizer, one-time logger, native of the Gaspe. Both were
colorful and forceful teachers, particularly strong on that
practical experience of struggle, without which "theory is
barren." Our approach in this introduction to Marxism
sought to combine elements of a grasp of materialist dialectics
—history as structures in process, movement and process as
change through conflict, the interaction of nature and society
("the metabolism" of the two, as Marx put it)—with concrete
illustrations from the "here and now" of living experience
from Quebec, Canadian and worldwide working-class
struggles.
A theme that loomed large in the study-group discussions
was that of international solidarity against fascism and the
creeping onset of a new world war—and against the imperi-
154
Comrade Beth
alism that was spawning both. In our view, the working-class
internationalism asserted in 1848 as a fundamental principle
of the Communist Manifesto, in no way denied but in fact pre-
supposed a deeply democratic national consciousness. As the
expression of fraternal solidarity with combatants of other
countries engaged in a common cause, it need not contradict
devotion to one's own country's true national interest. Inter-
nationalism, not as denial of national identity but as its com-
pletion in the setting of struggles of peoples with common
interest the world over, was for us a long-standing tradition:
the Chartists' support of the Canadian Patriotes; or the work
of Dr. Alexander Ross of Brockville, Ontario, in the "Under-
ground railway" of the U.S. anti-slavery movement; or
Arthur Buies, the Quebec poet-journalist enrolled in the lib-
eration army of Garibaldi.
Two problem-questions in particular challenged us: one,
the relationship between class struggle for socialism and the
waging of that selfsame struggle for democracy and peace;
the other, the national question in the same setting. What
drew these preoccupations into focus for us was the October
Revolution, the break-through of 1917 that had opened the
way to the first heroic attempt at building a socialist society,
under incredibly difficult conditions. Hitler's proclaimed ob-
jective of destroying the Soviet Union (and the collusion of
his Western backers in that aim) made imperative the united-
front orientation of the Left from 1935 on. The socialist cause
drew sustenance and conviction from the embattled presence
of a socialist reality. As against the rampant irrationality of
the crisis-ridden "profit system" at home, there stood in glar-
ing contrast the "pro-people", co-operative ownership and
planned-economy approach of Soviet-society as then per-
ceived by the Canadian Left. (The visit to Leningrad in 1935
had been significant for Bethune as a Canadian progressive,
755
Bethune: The Montreal Years
precisely in terms of that contrast). Seen from the crisis-
stricken world of "free enterprise" corporate capitalism, the
Soviet Union of the first five-year economic plans—overcom-
ing unemployment, inaugurating social medicine, and carry-
ing through a "cultural revolution" that drew literally tens of
millions of people into participation in and enjoyment of the
arts—was surely blazing the trail to new, open uplands of a
future world. (The Moscow "Purge" trials were just begin-
ning then, and the C.P.S.U. Twentieth Congress lay twenty
years ahead ...) .
The crux of internationalism as it bears on the national inter-
est is in one's understanding of the nature of that interest, in
terms of social class and nation-community. We were moving
then, belatedly, towards recognition of the "national fact" of
French-speaking Quebec, and support for its struggle for na-
tional equality. (A pamphlet of ours of that year, Le Reveil du
Canada francais, bears witness to that recognition, as well as to
its limitations: the strength of the nationalist-clerical Right
overshadowed for us still the progressive potential of a demo-
cratic-nationalist Left.)
Norman Bethune, with fellow-Montrealer Hazen Sise, in
the Canadian Blood Transfusion mobile unit in Republican
Spain, was to provide a living example of internationalism, as
were the combatants in the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau
Battalion. The Mac-Paps included dozens of "language
group" and anglophone party members from Montreal, to-
gether with such francophone volunteers as Francois Morin,
Joseph Campbell, Emile Gosselin, among those killed in ac-
tion.
Bethune in Spain carried forward, for many Montreal
workers, the tradition of dedication and solidarity that the
Group for the People's Health had begun to establish in
working-class areas. The thousands who were to turn out to
156
Comrade Beth
greet him on his return from Spain, at the Windsor Station
and at the rally in the Mount Royal Arena, embodied the
deep sense of solidarity that the antifascist cause called forth.
Dimensions of Conflict
"The name is BETHune," not BethUNE." The voice over-
heard was crisp, with a touch of asperity. Caught in the crush
of a reception in his honour, at the home of comrades, not far
from the "Vic", the speaker, just back from Spain, went on to
allude to a Norman-Scots ancestry, then dismissed the matter.
(I don't know why that moment of memory should have per-
sisted, when so much else is lost and irretrievable. One is
one's name of course, in the sense that to hear it uttered is to
sense a challenge, a summons: the name is a signal to oneself
of the self s identity.)
Strong characters are not usually possessed of a weak ego.
Bethune's rebellious individuality can hardly have augured
easy integration in a disciplined collective. The stormy pro-
mise was well kept—but not widely understood. Individual
assertion of identity has become, in our mechanically ho-
mogenized society, a necessity of survival. Exaggerate it,
though, and you become a banner-bearer of "possessive in-
dividualism", of the inflated, profiteering corporate ego of
private enterprise. Efface it, at the other extremity of the spec-
trum, and you may well become a supine accomplice to domi-
nation.
The outstanding quality in Bethune's make-up was the
way he gave of himself. He had more to give than most, and
sacrifice, for him no less than for others, meant settling ac-
counts with individualism and self-indulgence. Yet, somehow,
to give wholly to a cause one's entire energies and will be-
comes a most powerful affirmation. He who would gain his
757
Bethune: The Montreal Years
life shall lose it: this dialectic is an ancient truth, and histori-
cally its roots are religious as well as broadly social.
Like not a few other radicals with a deep-rooted religious
family background, Bethune drew from his something of the
sense of service and dedication: what one could call the resid-
ual religiosity of the apostate—the devotion, the intense
spirit of brotherhood and comradeship in a cause far greater
than the concerns of self. There are glimpses of this from the
time of childhood.
In Charlottetown, not long ago, the venerable translator
of the Bible, Dr. William Bailey, recalled his friendship with
the Bethunes, with their young son Norman growing up in
the Presbyterian manse in a small Ontario community. What
impressed Dr. Bailey about the boy was that he was at once
lively, intensely religious—and at times vehemently rebel-
lious. Clearly, the potential was there for what the context of
capitalist crisis would one day fuse in ways unforeseen. By
different but not unrelated paths in the 1930s in England Dr.
Hewlett Johnston, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, and in Can-
ada Mary and James G. Endicott sought out paths of conver-
gence of social Christianity and Marxian socialism. Other
were the paths of those, who, rejecting Christian dogma
(often more in anger than in sorrow, I would surmise), yet
preserved the spiritual stance and substance of a kind of secu-
lar-Christian ethic.
Ernest Renan, nineteenth-century biblical critic and au-
thor of a celebrated Life of Jesus, is quoted as follows, approv-
ingly, by Frederick En gels: "When you want to get a distinct
idea of what the first Christian communities were, do not
compare them to the parish congregations of our day: they
were rather like local sections of the International Working
Men's Association." And Engels continues: "Christianity got
hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does, in the
755
Comrade Beth
shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting indi-
vidual views ... but all opposed to the ruling system, to 'the
powers that be'." In a later essay "On the History of Early
Christianity", he argues that this was "a religion that was to
become one of the most revolutionary elements in the human
mind", and again: 'Christianity, like every great revolution-
ary movement, was made by the masses."
For a middle-class professional to accept the implications
of working-class leadership in social struggle takes a ruthless
critical readiness to reassess all the established snobberies and
shibboleths of "respectable" society. To Bethune's rebellious
spirit this was congenial enough. Much harder, far more de-
manding, was the re-casting and disciplining in the sustained
pattern of conduct and responses of a revolutionary. The
battle with this challenge was to be waged successively and at
last successfully in two theatres of war.
Rebellion against orthodoxies and conformity has usually
included rejection of sexual conventions as well. "It is a curi-
ous fact," Engels noted, "that with every great revolutionary
movement the question of 'free love' comes into the fore-
ground." Those of us on the Left in the thirties tended to
react in different ways to this problem area. We opposed male
chauvinism and inequality between the sexes as expressions
of a class society founded on exploitation; and counterposed
to bourgeois hypocrisy, the honesty and mutuality of a free
relationship between equals. But the shut-in sort of "inner
exile" that attends the life of small, sectarian groups of would-
be revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary setting can foster
another attitude: in the name of "revolutionaryness" disre-
gard for the individual as a person.
I remember a Young Communist League group in To-
ronto in 1932 or '33 being sternly informed by the Party sec-
retary that a revolutionary "has no private life." The dictum
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
seemed wholly plausible, in the conditions under which the
underground Left was working at the time. What was not so
apparent was the way the "no private life" adage sometimes
served to justify an irresponsible handling of relations be-
tween people. Between the bourgeois morality that had been
cast out and the communist morality of the society that was to
be, an ethical vacuum tended to install itself, whose effect was
cynicism. In the long run this corrosive spread from sex to
politics. The result: opportunism. Bethune was neither cynic
nor opportunist. In the matter of his relationships with
women I believe the essential thing has been said by Libbie
Park: for him, women were equals, and he treated them as
such.
If to be happy is to possess the sense of a life worth living,
Bethune knew happiness. All the pain and loneliness did not
outweigh the dominant note of meaningfulness, in action and
relationships, insights, the recurring sense of beauty and
truth—what he wrote bears witness to it.
"I am 'Comrade Beth'... ," he wrote in Montreal, 1935. "I
am treated like a kingly Comrade," he noted in Hopei, 1939.
The love of co-workers sharing their lives in a labour not
without risk, but buoyed by a common pole-star of convic-
tion. With this came risks, not only from the outer enemy, but
from within: relinquishment of one's own critical, questioning
faculty, or that of others (temptation of the "cult").
In the tensions born of selfishness and a greater generos-
ity, individualism and dedication, there is no possible doubt
as to which in him, outweighed the other. For all the very
human contrariness of impulses and attitudes, in the evolving
person that was Bethune, he fought ceaselessly to grow, to
mature, to transcend, to become the whole being that was his
and our vision of the Communist. No more than the rest was
he a monolith.
160
Comrade Beth
The conflicting images of Norman Bethune that remain
with those who loved him and those who did not mingle the
intensely personal and the heavily (or lightly) ideological:
"The man was a Communist?' "He was a rare, beautiful per-
son, he embodied an extraordinary affirmation of life, of all of
it!" "He was insufferable. I hated his guts." "He was a Com-
rade".
The person that Bethune was, never easy to sum up or
define, becomes more elusive yet, because of the refraction-
effect of death and apotheosis. What if he had lived? Point-
less, impossible question, whose only merit is to bring us back
to the prosaic everyday dimension of ordinary existence that
he knew "also". A dimension that denies wholeness and abso-
lutes: the very things that fired his fierce striving to transcend
evil, to out-reach the given. Practitioner of the science and art
of medicine, but painter and poet also, and above all, man of
action, Bethune was drawn to a world view that lent a fresh
coherence to each of the realms of being—and their inter-
relationships.
But—do we have to "understand" him, as a person?
Enough that for us he did indeed exist, generously, and that
in him contradiction was lived as struggle, to the last.
Action the Issue
In Bethune, a vehement assertion of individuality appears, in
retrospect, to have been transmuted into a selfless dedication.
A paradox? An over-simplification, rather. For one thing, in-
ner struggle is left out of the picture: water turned to wine, a
miracle!—whereas the fever of fermentation works a trans-
formation that is a law-governed process of nature, qualitative
change through struggle of opposites. Fever and fermentation
churned in Bethune to the last.
767
Bethune: The Montreal Years
Politically, the issue of "individual versus collective" is a
challenge to the bourgeois intellectual in terms of radical de-
mocracy. An elitism of name and birth (feudal-aristocratic),
of wealth (capitalist), of learning and culture (attendant on
one or other of the foregoing)—each entails a dimension of
dominance. That one person (or a few) shall lord it over the
many requires that these latter be put down, devalued. The
elevation of the many via the downfall of the few is the demo-
cratic work of revolution: whereby a social system based on
minority command of property and power may then give way
to a new, communitarian pattern. Equality as abolition of all
social classes, of all structures founded on exploitation—such
is the aim of Marxism.
"The meek shall inherit the earth": early-Christian com-
munism. The great shall be dethroned and cast down, the
dispossessed, the little people, raised up and glorified. But de-
individualized? Not necessarily. Rather the contrary, if the
"cult of personality" (a polite term for despotism) is to be
avoided.
For another thing, the outer context of struggle is as-
sumed without really being critically understood. Was the
dedication of the rest of the men and women engaged in the
liberation struggle a lesser thing? Their names are not known
to us, and is that a denial of their worth? Bethune would hotly
have denied it as a slander of his comrades. But we have here
to do with war, which has its own monstrous logic. This "con-
tinuation of politics by other means" is organization of
killing, it is discipline, hierarchy, command, the firing-squad:
in short, an absolutism of regimented, coercive power over
persons. Not even the aura of a just cause, of a "people's war",
can transcend the antithesis of democracy that, of necessity, is
military power. Yet that war must be waged—and won—or
all is lost.
162
Comrade Beth
The antidote to a domineering power is never powerless-
ness. The issue is democracy: not "formal", merely, but in
substance and in depth. And on the scale of the planet: hence
an aim, and as such, actual: a matter of action now. (Contrary
to the approach that treats fundamental aims as some sort of
irrelevancies to be shelved pro tern.) The "sect" is but the
power-structure "writ exceeding small." The ingrown arro-
gance of dogmatism and its companion, bureaucratic conceit
(Bethune's fury at mindless manifestations of domineering bu-
reaucracy was unbounded), was just as likely to rub out per-
sonal identities as it was to fabricate "cults of personality." A
recent illustration of this cast of mind is cited by Jean-Paul
Sartre in his preface entitled "The Socialism that came in
from the cold" to Antonin Liehm's Talks on the Czechoslo-
vak cultural phenomenon—interviews with people of three
generations:
I remember a conversation with a Latin American writer
—it was in 1960. Weary, but lucid rather than disillu-
sioned, he was still active; I know his life had been filled
with combat, victories, defeats; that he had known exile
and imprisonment, been expelled then readmitted by his
comrades; and that through this incessant struggle he
had preserved his fidelities while shedding his illusions.
"That story of yours," I told him, "you must write it."
He shook his head—it was the only time that he let
bitterness creep in: "We Communists have no personal
history." I understood: the autobiography I had just sug-
gested, whether his own or that of one or other of his
comrades, here or elsewhere, had scant chance of seeing
the light of day. No history, no memory. The Party has
both.
(Perhaps it is somewhere in this area that the roots of militar-
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Bethune: The Montreal Tears
ized-bureaucratic "distortions" of the socialist purpose must
be sought: in a world loaded to the gunnels with armaments
for planetary annihilation, the vision of a radical-democratic
"alternative society" can only be planetary too. Lesser, "lo-
cal" approximations cannot be more than just that, and may
be much less, in the shadow of nuclear war.)
The paradox was to be resolved in struggle—and in
death. Bethune's affirmation of life, his capacity for love and
passion and perceptiveness, imagination and directness in re-
lating action to thought, the sense of history that he found in
Marxism and made his own, together worked for the fulfil-
ment, in battlefront infernos on two continents, of potential
for nobility. A struggle waged within, all of whose front-line
tensions and intensity could not so reshape the man as to
make of him some kind of selfless saint, yet impelled him, to
the end, to work under fire in a cause he knew to be funda-
mentally just. That, perhaps, tells us the main thing.
Henry Norman Bethune was to be treated oddly by pos-
terity, at least during the first half-century following his
death; and this in totally contradictory ways. From "official
Canada" for thirty years he got the silent treatment, and
when this could be maintained no longer, Ottawa's according
of a belated recognition was marked by no small awkward-
ness.
By his comrades in the left-wing movement and a wide
circle of Canadian Leftists and democrats, Bethune's memory
was honoured and warmly cherished. None of us foresaw
however, or could ever have imagined, the effect of the Chi-
nese people's revolution, victorious barely a decade after his
death, in according Norman Bethune an apotheosis such that
his homeland could finally no longer officially refuse him his
place in history. ("That which the Grecians call Apotheosis
164
Comrade Beth
... was the supreme honour which a man could attribute unto
man."—Francis Bacon)
While considerations of state policy in Canadian commer-
cial and external affairs played a major part in the matter of
recognition of Bethune, "internal affairs" were hardly attuned
to a revision of official attitudes towards Communism, Marx-
ism or revolutionary socialism. An outstanding Canadian
who was an outstanding Communist—unimaginable! So it
has been pretended that the second term in the equation
either (a) did not exist, or (b) must really have been some-
thing else.
An editorial in the Montreal Star in 1972 typifies the estab-
lishment's effort at rationalization—and not over-subtle dis-
tortion. Entitled "Bethune recognized", it noted that "Every
time a prominent Canadian visits China, reporters send back
accounts of his amazement over discovering the position Dr.
Norman Bethune occupies in Chinese lore." Like Trade Min-
ister Jean-Luc Pepin a year earlier, External Affairs Minister
Mitchell Sharp, on a visit to Peking, was now prepared to
proclaim that Ottawa at last recognized Bethune as a Cana-
dian "of national historic significance", the announcement
being made simultaneously in Peking and Gravenhurst,
Ontario, Bethune's birthplace.
"What is so odd", the perplexed editorialist continues, "is
that it required mounting visits by Chinese, who invariably
make a pilgrimage to Gravenhurst, to educate Canadians
about the unusual character of Dr. Bethune. Equally odd is
the endeavor—at least by some commentators—to identify
Bethune as a Communist. Not only is there a touch of conde-
scension in the labelling; it is imprecise."
Not "untrue", mark you—just "imprecise". The fleeting
nuance then becomes a whole sanctimonious paragraph: "Be-
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Bethune: The Montreal Years
thune, it happened, went to work to save lives on the Loyalist
side in the Spanish Civil War and later on the Communist side
in the Chinese struggle against the Japanese. But funda-
mentally no ideological tag fits him. He may be called an
iconoclast who opposed entrenched ideas, even of hospitals in
Montreal; he may be called a non-conformist who believed
that he was his own man, and no one else's. Essentially, how-
ever, he was a humanitarian—with daring, imagination and
flair in rare combination—and it is for this, fittingly, that he
deserves to be remembered."
The truth was, of course, that Norman Bethune, as a com-
mitted Communist, saw the issues facing mankind and acted
on them: as a consistent antifascist, anti-imperialist, as a Ca-
nadian democrat and internationalist. He understood—and
put the understanding into practice at the cost of his life—
that a radical democratization of society, national equality
and self-determination, are the only possible direction for any
socialist advance. And that the heroic courage of the resis-
tance struggles of the peoples of Spain and China signalled
the only possible course for the forces of world-wide funda-
mental change.
He was not mistaken.
166
Notes on Sources
Information on Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale
was obtained from Jean-Louis Roy's Les Programmes Electoraux
du Quebec, Tome 2, 1931-1966 (Montreal: 1971). For further
discussion of the revolutionary aspects of early Christianity
see On Religion by Marx and En gels (Moscow: 1957). Jean-
Paul Sartre's preface entitled "The Socialism that came in
from the Cold" can be found in Trois generations, Collection
Temoins (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).