- Born
- Died
- Nickname
- Beth
- Norman Bethune was born on March 3, 1890 in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Canada. He was a writer, known for Bethune (1964), Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the 20th Century (2002) and Doctor Bethune (1939). He died on November 12, 1939 in Tanghsien, Hopei, China.
- Performed throat surgery in Hollywood on actress Renée Adorée.
- Grand-uncle of actress Zina Bethune.
- He was an early advocate of socialized medicine and being a Communist sympathizer, he went to China and performed emergency battlefield procedures on soldiers fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War. He died there from blood poisoning contracted while operating with a cut finger.
- In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. While the standard treatment was long periods of rest, he invented a device that artificially induced pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, and had this done on himself in the hopes that his diseased lung would rest and heal itself by not functioning for a time. This was a radical, new treatment at the time, but his lung made a full recovery.
- In 1931, while visiting a sanatorium in Prescott, Arizona, he performed a phrenicectomy on actress Renée Adorée, who was a patient there at the time being treated for tuberculosis. This involved making an incision at the base of the neck and removing part of the phrenic nerve, which causes the diaphragm to rise. The procedure partially depresses the lung, allowing it to rest in hopes of expediting healing to the lung, a similar goal of the pneumothorax procedure he had developed and successfully treated himself with. However, Adoree died of tuberculosis in Los Angeles in 1933.
- Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels. Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism. Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?'
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