Norman Bethune - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1917, with the war still in progress, Bethune joined the Royal Navy as a Surgeon-Lieutenant at the Chatham Hospital in England. In 1919, he began an internship specializing in children's diseases at The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, London. Later he went to Edinburgh, where he earned the FRCS qualification at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1920 he met the strikingly beautiful Frances Penny. They were complete opposites; she was a subdued introvert; he was a brash extrovert, but in spite of this they married in 1923. After a one-year “Grand Tour” of Europe, during which they spent her entire inheritance, they moved to Detroit, Michigan, where Bethune took up private practice and also took a part-time job as an instructor at the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery.

In 1926 Bethune contracted tuberculosis due to overwork and from his close contact with the sick. He sought treatment at the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Believing he was dying, he insisted his wife divorce him and return to her native Scotland, so she did.

In the 1920s the established treatment for TB was total bed rest in a sanatorium. While convalescing Bethune read about a radical new treatment for tuberculosis called pneumothorax. This involved artificially collapsing the tubercular (diseased) lung, thus allowing it to rest and heal itself. The physicians at the Trudeau thought this procedure was too new and risky. But Bethune insisted. He had the operation performed and made a full and complete recovery.

Upon recuperation Bethune immediately wrote to his ex-wife and proposed marriage again. At first she refused but eventually he and Frances were remarried in 1929. This marriage did not survive, and they were divorced again for a final time in 1933. The best man at both weddings was his colleague at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Dr Archibald Wilkie.

In 1929 Bethune joined the thoracic surgical pioneer, Dr. Edward William Archibald, the Surgeon-in-Chief of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, the teaching hospital affiliated with McGill University. From 1929 to 1936 Bethune perfected his skills in thoracic surgery and developed or modified more than a dozen new surgical tools. His most famous instrument was the Bethune Rib Shears, which still remains in use today. He published 14 articles describing his innovations in thoracic technique.