THE COLOUR OF BLOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 815, 11 March 1955, Page 13

THE COLOUR OF BLOOD

THE SCALPEL, THE SWORD, by Sydney Gordon and Ted Allen; Robert Hale, English price 16/-, ‘THIS is the story of Dr. Norman Bethune, a brilliant Canadian surgeon who made the battlefields his world. It was Bethune’s writing that told the story | of Malaga and Almeria to shocked noninterventionists in 1936, when Franco’s German bombers pummelled women and children in the Spanish War. He was already famous in the medical world, as an arch-enemy of tuberculosis, an inventor of methods to fight it, and patenter of instruments to fight it with. But in the Great Depression he found that bad economics bred T.B. faster than doctors could cure it; and he became politically red. He was Chief Thoracic Surgeon at the Sacre Coeur Hospital, Montreal; a teacher and consultant, whose papers were read in the leading medical journals of the Englishspeaking world. He went to Spain because hig convictions told him that "the insanity (Fascism) . . is spreading too quickly." But he didn’t go with a sword. He went with blood-banks: the first man in the history of human carnage to carry blood right to the battlefield, in bottles, on trucks. After Spain, China. "I am going to China because I feel that is where the. need is greatest; that is where I can be most useful," he wrote in 1938. At that time Japan was the enemy; and, as he was to find, Chiang Kai-shek. The tortuous policies of the Kuomintang have never been brought out more tellingly than in this story of an incorruptible. Bethure worked in Shansi; and while Japan threatened all China, Chiang Kaishek’s government found time to blockade Chinese partisans, and even to misappropriate funds sent by American democrats to Madame Sun Yat-Sen’s medical committee. Bethune died in China of septicemia, in 1939, after operating without rubber gloves. Drugs could have saved him, but drugs didn’t get through the Yellow Curtain. Before he died he revolutionised medicine in China. This is a fine book, about a very great

man,

Anton

Vogt