Beishuun established blood transfusion service in Madrid

The Madrid blood-donation action, organized by Norman Bethune and the Canadian Institute of Blood Transfusion, established a refrigerated-blood service for the Republic’s wounded during the siege of Madrid. It joined medical innovation to a citywide act of solidarity: equipment brought from Canada was turned into a working laboratory, Madrid residents answered a public appeal in overwhelming numbers, and blood was collected, labeled, stored, and prepared for transport to the front. The initiative’s later presence in family photographs and hidden papers gives it a second life as evidence of the doctor’s wartime past.

Arrival and preparation

On 14 December 1936, Bethune reached Madrid after weeks of arrangements with his government and fundraising, a crossing of the Atlantic, an arduous road journey through France, and a difficult passage across a divided Spain. He arrived at 36 Príncipe de Vergara Street, where the authorities gave him a fifteen-room apartment formerly occupied by a German diplomat who had remained away after the coup. The International Red Aid headquarters was on the floor above, placing the new service close to an organization already mobilized for relief.

Within hours, Bethune and his colleagues cleared furniture, paintings, and carpets to convert the apartment into a laboratory. Its equipment included an Electrolux refrigerator, a large autoclave, sterilizers, glassware, blood bottles, syringes, microscopes, thoracic-surgery instruments, and supplies of serum. Fifteen portable kits were especially important: backpacks equipped with bottles and solutions, plus a sterilized case containing basic instruments and suture material. The domestic rooms had become a medical operation, and the portable kits made it possible to take the work beyond the laboratory.

The donation drive and its organization

The Canadian Institute of Blood Transfusion began its public appeal the day after Bethune arrived. Newspaper advertisements and three days of radio announcements asked Madrid residents to donate blood for soldiers at the front. The proposal went beyond direct, arm-to-arm transfusion, the method then available; its success depended on whether blood could be collected and kept usable before it was needed. The organizers therefore faced both a technical challenge and uncertainty about whether civilians would respond to an appeal made outside a hospital.

Bethune’s concern was answered on 19 December, the first day of donations. Before the Institute opened, a queue of volunteers already stretched around the corner. Civilians and soldiers of different ages, occupations, and circumstances came forward; women outnumbered men on the cots. Donors had to confirm they were fasting, a condition emphasized repeatedly in the publicity, and gave half a litre of blood. Each filled bottle was marked with the donor’s identity, blood group, and date of extraction, turning individual donations into identifiable, organized supplies rather than an anonymous reserve.

The Institute paired the clinical procedure with modest practical acknowledgments. Donors were offered a drink from a bottle of brandy and a voucher for food; as the siege tightened the city’s living conditions, each donation could bring a tin of beef. These provisions placed the appeal within the material privations of wartime Madrid, while the act of donating made residents participants in support for the Republic’s soldiers.

Refrigeration and transport to the front

The response exceeded the storage capacity of the largest commercially available refrigerator: in just over three days, the collected bottles filled it, while volunteers continued to queue each morning outside the even-numbered side of Príncipe de Vergara Street. In his first report to Benjamin Spence, the Toronto-based president of the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and a sponsor and friend of the mission, Bethune acknowledged that the team did not yet know how long citrated blood would remain in good condition under refrigeration. They hoped it would last several weeks. The report records both the scale of the collection and the uncertainty that still surrounded the new method.

On 23 December, the service was put to use at the Hospital de Sangre de la Casa de Campo, near the front. Early that morning Bethune’s team filled the portable equipment’s bottles with blood from different groups, loaded the backpacks into a truck, and went to the hospital. There, Bethune selected a young soldier in critical condition from severe blood loss. His treatment brought the carefully prepared supply, the portable kits, and the aim of the donation drive into direct contact with the need for transfusion at the front.

A medical legacy kept in family papers

The action remains in the novel not only as a wartime undertaking but as part of the evidence surrounding the narrator’s concealed family history. Nearly eight years after putting his memories of life with Amparo in a leather folder, he finds that folder inside the lining of an old trunk. Among its contents are his medical degree, union card, and a photograph of himself with Bethune, posed for the cover of El Heraldo. The photograph links his professional life to the Madrid blood service and to a past he has kept apart from his present.

The same envelope contains a republican family record naming Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, their son’s birth certificate, their wedding photograph, and an apologetic note dated 28 March 1939. The juxtaposition matters: the public work represented by the Bethune photograph sits beside private documents that reveal a marriage, a child, and an unresolved separation. A later account explains that Amparo’s son had been raised under the name José Antonio Urbieta and taught to believe that the man in a Falangist portrait, said to have died in Russia, was his father. The hidden record of the family and the photograph of the wartime doctor belong to the same concealed past, though they disclose different parts of it.

Years later, the son discovers the family documents while searching his mother’s drawer for money. He finds his birth certificate, a republican family book, a photograph of his mother pregnant beside the doctor who had visited him during illness, and an image of a note asking forgiveness. These objects lead him to question the story he had been told and to conclude that the doctor was his father. The blood-service photograph, meanwhile, is a visible remnant of the earlier life that official names and family silence had obscured.

The action’s legacy is thus carried through both medicine and memory. In Madrid, labeled bottles, refrigeration, and portable equipment made donated blood available beyond the moment and place of collection. In the later family story, a photograph with Bethune survives among documents that gradually undo a false account of parentage. The same wartime past that began as an organized effort to preserve life becomes, years afterward, part of the material record through which a son can recover his father’s identity.