After a stint as a stretcher bearer during World War I, Dr. Norman Bethune returned to Canada to complete his medical degree and campaign for a more socially equal healthcare system. In 1935 he visited the Soviet Union to learn about their healthcare system and became a communist. The next year he joined the anti-fascists in Spain, providing medical guidance and supplies to those working in the Republican Army; during this time he invented battlefield blood banks.
When news broke of the Japanese aggression occurring in China, Bethune traveled to the Shanxi-Hebei region with a mobile medical unit. For the next 18 months he worked on the front line, treating both wounded soldiers and local civilians. It is said that he also established over 20 medical teaching hospitals during this period. He died there, of blood poisoning from a cut finger.
In 1952 Bethune’s body was moved to the Martyrs’ Memorial Park at Shijiazhuang. The Norman Bethune International Peace Hospital sits across the road from his tomb. A quotation from Chairman Mao is engraved on the tomb: “What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people’s liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn.”