23 December 1936

23 December 1936 marks the first successful refrigerated-blood transfusion in the novel: at the front in Madrid, Norman Bethune revives a soldier who is dying from massive blood loss. The breakthrough changes transfusion from a procedure requiring donor and patient to be connected in person into a practical use of stored blood, and the narrator links that single morning’s intervention to thousands of lives saved during the war and millions of later beneficiaries.

At the Front

Early that morning, Bethune’s team fills portable equipment with blood from donors of every group, loads its packs into a truck, and drives to the Hospital de Sangre de la Casa de Campo. There, among soldiers considered beyond help, Bethune chooses a young man in hypovolemic shock. A Spanish doctor has given up on the patient, whose breathing is feeble and whose skin is pale, damp, and cold. Through an interpreter, Bethune asks permission to try to revive him. The hospital director grants it skeptically, expecting the soldier to die regardless, and stays to watch.

The Transfusion

Bethune pricks the soldier’s finger and uses a glass rod to collect a sample. After two minutes, he identifies the blood group and begins transfusing the first bottle. The patient moves and opens his eyes, but has lost so much blood that Bethune gives him a second bottle. Before it is finished, the soldier looks at Bethune and smiles. The sequence makes the advance visible not as an abstract medical claim but as a reversal at the bedside: a man treated as already lost responds to stored blood.

A Change in Medical Practice

The novel presents the procedure as the first time refrigerated blood has brought a doomed patient back to life. Because the blood can be collected and stored, the donor no longer has to be beside the recipient, connected by needles and tubing. Transfusion becomes easier to organize and more practical and effective. The event is thus both an individual rescue and a change in the conditions under which emergency treatment can be delivered.

Immediate and Lasting Consequences

That morning at the Casa de Campo hospital, Bethune’s intervention revives twelve soldiers, although the first survivor’s name is not recorded. His companions celebrate by putting a lit cigarette in his mouth; he draws on it eagerly as the field hospital fills with an unexpected burst of joy and hope. Those present raise cheers for Canada, Bethune, the Republic, working-class struggle, and international solidarity. The revived soldier adds his own claim to the celebration, crying, “¡Viva yo!”

The narrator places this unnamed man’s survival within a much larger consequence: Bethune’s discovery saves thousands of soldiers in the People’s Army of the Spanish Republic during the civil war, and the technique later benefits millions. The scene joins medical innovation to collective effort—the earlier donation drive, the portable equipment, the field team, and the patient’s survival—while giving the historical breakthrough a deliberately human measure: one soldier returns to life and insists on being counted among those who made history.