SURGEON WITH A CAUSE

In November 1936 two men from Canada drove through France’s Rhone Valley on their way to the Spanish Civil War. A handwritten sign on the side of their battered Ford station wagon made it clear that the Canadians, like the majority of foreign volunteers, were on the side of Spain’s recently elected Republican government.

French sympathizers raised clenched fists in support as the station wagon passed by. But one of the men, Norman Bethune, a physician from Montreal, barely noticed. He spent much of the journey immersed in a book about blood transfusions.

Four months before Bethune arrived in the capital city of Madrid, General Francisco Franco had declared war on the new government. Franco’s Nationalist forces had the support of wealthy landowners, big business, leaders of the Catholic Church, and the Falange, Spain’s Fascist party. Fascist leaders elsewhere in Europe also rushed to Franco’s aid: Germany’s Adolf Hitler provided 100 warplanes and 16,000 soldiers; Italy’s Benito Mussolini sent 50,000 troops. The Spanish government, on the other hand, was backed by workers, liberal writers, and artists and left-wing political parties, along with some 40,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries.

From his earliest years, Bethune had thrived on taking chances.

From his earliest years, Bethune had thrived on taking chances. In 1896, when he was just six years old, he disappeared from his Toronto home one morning only to return hours later to announce that he had walked across