Why is there money for this and not for that?
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 16, 2012 - 0 Comments
Ralph Goodale raises the matter of the Norman Bethune memorial to question cuts to the Motherwell Homestead in Abernathy, Saskatchewan.
It’s no wonder people around Abernethy feel strongly about this National Historic Site. It costs less than $400,000/year to operate as a vital community asset, tourist attraction, educational tool, job creator, and living monument to a prairie hero. But none of that matters to Stephen Harper. Like that tree nursery at nearby Indian Head, the Motherwell Homestead got chopped in this year’s budget. It’s being drastically downsized and left to languish as a pale shadow of what it used to be.
This is a dumb decision. But worse still, it’s biased and discriminatory. While the Motherwell Homestead is being gutted, the Harper Conservatives are putting $2.5-million into the home-riding of Treasury Board Minister Tony Clement for a National Historic Site near Muskoka, Ontario. Remember “pork-barrel” Tony? He’s the Harper Minister who mis-spent $50-million without lawful authority on sheer waste (e.g., ornamental gazebos and sidewalks to nowhere) to puff-up his riding before the G-8 fiasco there in 2010. Now he gets yet another spending boondoggle, while Abernethy gets cut. Why?
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Norman Bethune: Canadian icon or communist villain (or merely something to talk about this week)?
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 4:59 PM - 0 Comments
Conservative MP Rob Anders is displeased with the Harper government’s decision to provide funding for the Bethune Memorial House.
In celebrating Norman Bethune, Tony Clement at least has company in the likes of Chuck Strahl, Michael Chong, Lawrence Cannon and Gary Goodyear. Last year, the Canadian Mint released a commemorative coin to mark the 75th anniversary of Dr. Bethune’s invention of the blood transfusion vehicle. In 2007, the Harper government created the Norman Bethune Health Research Scholarships Program that allows for Chinese students to pursue PhDs in Canada.
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The stuff of war, raw and uncensored
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
The War Museum’s new exhibit on medicine blends history, emotion and gore
Mark Holleron/Canadian War Museum; Emanuela Appetiti
One of the first images confronted by a visitor to the Canadian War Museum’s War and Medicine exhibit is a photograph of a young American veteran of the Iraq war, shirtless, his back to the camera while his mother, a woman with grey hair and large eyes, embraces him. About one-third of the soldier’s head is missing. “There’s this mother who’s going to be caring for her son, who’s in his late 20s, for the rest of her life,” says Tim Cook, co-curator of the exhibition. “This show is not just about battlefield trauma. It’s about the long-lasting impact of war. It’s about hurting and healing and caring.”
A balanced mix of emotion and material history, the show was developed by the Wellcome Collection in London, England, and the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, Germany. But Cook and fellow curator Andrew Burtch have adapted it by adding 150 images and artifacts, some from the museum’s permanent collection, others unique and unlikely to have been widely seen before. There’s a ceramic pot for holding leeches—once widely used to “bleed” infected patients—from the Museum of Health Care in Kingston, Ont.; a small display on Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who pioneered mobile blood transfusion during the Spanish Civil War and died a hero in China; and a handwritten copy of the poem “In Flanders Fields,” sent by its author, Canadian doctor and soldier John McCrae, to an American friend. The letter is normally housed at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine.
Other items are more gruesome. A section of the show titled “The Body” demonstrates the physical damage caused by war and its attendant diseases. There are models of blown-apart faces and syphilitic genitals, as well as other body parts: a punctured skull, a brain traversed by a bullet, a leg bone riddled with holes created when pus from an infection tried to force its way through. “We haven’t pulled any punches. This is the stuff of war,” says Cook.
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Norman Bethune vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best
By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 6:15 PM - 0 Comments
At least one Canadian medical hero will fall by the wayside
Norman Bethune
Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.
Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.
Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best
Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.
Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.
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Guy Laliberté vs. Norman Bethune
By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments
Sure, healing battle wounds is a noble pursuit. But is it as entertaining as Cirque du Soleil?
Guy Laliberté
Why he’s famous: For making the circus cool with the Cirque du Soleil
Why he deserves to win: Laliberté didn’t just take out the goofy animal stunts from the circus when he decided to class up the tent a little. He brought in a focus on character-driven narrative to replace them, effectively hybridizing the circus with theatre and opera. Thanks to him, acrobats no longer have to fear being mauled by a lion or bear while on the job.
Norman Bethune
Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.
Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.
Next: Alexander Graham Bell vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best
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Norman Bethune vs. Lester B. Pearson
By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments
A battlefield doctor goes head to head with a peacekeeper
Norman Bethune
Why he’s famous: Bethune revolutionized battlefield medicine.
Why he deserves to win: During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune invented a mobile blood transfusion service which could collect blood from donors and deliver it wherever it was needed. His “mobile blood bank” is considered the greatest medical innovation from the war. Later, Bethune would take his battlefield medicine expertise to China, where he became the Red Army’s Medical Chief and taught his techniques to new doctors and nurses. Think of Bethune as the Canadian Florence Nightingale.
Lester B. Pearson
Why he’s famous: Putting the peacekeeping bug in the UN’s ear, though the blue helmets were somebody else’s idea.
Why he deserves to win: Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1957 for his role in establishing an international police force aimed at quelling lingering tensions from the previous year’s Suez Crisis. In doing so, Pearson effectively created the concept of peacekeeping, not only transforming the UN’s raison d’être, but also altering Canada’s role on the world stage. The former Canadian prime minister didn’t quite get soldiers to make love, but he showed they were good at making things other than war.
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Canada’s own medical marvel
By Lianne George - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 4 Comments
Legendary in China, Norman Bethune is all but forgotten at home
Toronto Star
On March 31, 1938, Mao Zedong, a young Communist revolutionary destined to bring about generations of social trauma, invited Dr. Norman Bethune to visit him in his quarters in Yan’an, China, for a conversation that lasted until early morning. In the weeks leading up to this visit—now forever enshrined in Chinese lore—Bethune, a brilliant and intrepid Canadian surgeon, traveled great distances, often on foot and under attack, helping Mao’s Communists fight fascism by tending to wounded soldiers and civilians, the only foreign doctor among 13 million Chinese.
After Bethune’s death a year later (he cut his finger on a patient’s bone shard and the wound became infected), Mao eulogized Bethune in a lengthy letter that schoolchildren would be required to memorize, word for word, for decades. In her new biography, Extraordinary Canadians: Norman Bethune, Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s former governor general and a veteran journalist, revisits the story of the man a billion and a half Chinese came to know as Pai-Chu-En—White One Sent.
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Donald Sutherland wows Whistler—while dying to take a whiz
By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, December 8, 2008 at 8:28 PM - 0 Comments
Jim Donovan (left) with jury members Donald Sutherland and Patricia Rozema • photo by Brian D. Johnson
When Donald Sutherland stepped on stage at the Whistler Film Festival Saturday night, he was wearing layer upon layer of clothing under a long trenchcoat. The coat stayed on for while as he as he took his seat for a special tribute to him. He explained he’d been throwing up all day. A case of suspected food poisoning. But as the event unfolded, this towering 73-year-old acting legend, a charismatic figure with a mane of white hair, rose to the occasion. As highlights of his immensely prolific career played on screens—clips the actor had chosen himself—Sutherland served up one delicious anecdote after another. He showed his swaggering, insolent interchange with Clint Eastwood on The Dirty Dozen, a few moments of film that he said forever changed his life. He talked about how Bernardo Bertolucci demanded he smash his head into a pillar in the scene where he kills a cat in 1900. Later, while re-enacting the scene in a drunken moment, he cut open his ear and required 17 stitches. After showing a clip from M.A.S.H, he talked about how its director, Robert Altman, tried to have him fired before he’d even set foot on the set, and how at the end of the shoot he and some fellow cast members tried to have Altman committed. Discussing Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and explaining that he suffered from extreme vertigo, Sutherland showed the scene of himself dangling from a collapsing scaffold in a church—a scene the stuntman had refused to do—and found out after the fact how close he had come to breaking his neck. Sutherland showed a heartbreaking scene with Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, and said that when they first shot it he bawled his eyes out. The next day, after watching the rushes, he told filmmakers that weeping had been a huge mistake and begged to reshoot it. They said it was fine. Then three months later, during editing, Redford called and said he was right. They needed to reshoot it. But they couldn’t get Moore. So Redford delivered the movie’s most emotional scene with Redford standing in for her. Continue…
