The Canadian Blood Transfusion Institute blood-donation drive in Madrid brought together Norman Bethune’s portable transfusion system and an extraordinary response from civilians in a besieged capital. Beginning days after Bethune’s arrival in December 1936, the drive collected and refrigerated donated blood for delivery to wounded Republican soldiers. It was more than a campaign of public generosity: it made stored blood and mobile transfusion units available at the front, and its work continued after Bethune departed for other fronts.

Arrival and establishment

Bethune reached Madrid on 14 December 1936, after weeks of arrangements with the Canadian government and fundraising that extended from government offices to popular collections. His journey had taken him across the Atlantic, overland through France, and along a difficult route through a Spain divided by war. At Príncipe de Vergara 36, the Institute’s quarters became the operational base for a project that joined Canadian medical aid to the Republic’s immediate wartime needs.

The authorities housed Bethune and his collaborators in a fifteen-room apartment formerly occupied by a German diplomat who had stayed away after the military uprising. The International Red Aid headquarters occupied the floor above. Within hours, the team removed furniture, paintings, and rugs to make room for a laboratory equipped with an Electrolux refrigerator, a large autoclave, sterilizers, and shelves of bottles, blood containers, syringes, microscopes, and surgical instruments. Among the equipment was a set of fifteen portable packs, each supplied with additional bottles, saline and glucose solutions, and a sterilized box containing basic instruments and sutures. The unfamiliar apparatus filled rooms once furnished as a diplomat’s home; the arrangement made Madrid the site of a medical system with no precedent anywhere in the world at that time.

Recruiting donors and storing blood

The Institute began its appeal the day after Bethune arrived. Newspaper advertisements and radio broadcasts over three days invited volunteers to donate blood for soldiers at the front. The request was a departure from direct, arm-to-arm transfusions, the only method then available. Bethune’s team hoped to collect and store blood for later use, but they did not know how the public would respond or how long citrated blood would remain usable in refrigeration. Their appeal came from a new institute rather than an established hospital, making the scale of the response uncertain.

On the morning of 19 December, before the Institute had opened, Bethune looked down from the balcony and saw a queue that already stretched around the corner. People of different ages and occupations, civilians and soldiers, had come to give blood; women consistently outnumbered men on the treatment couches. The turnout answered the organizers’ uncertainty with immediate, visible commitment. Although Bethune could not speak the language of many patients who would fill the rooms, he began to feel at home in the city whose residents had taken up the call.

Donors had been repeatedly instructed to arrive fasting. Each gave half a litre of blood, which flowed into a bottle containing a small amount of sodium citrate. Once full, the bottle was labelled with the blood group, date of extraction, and donor’s identity. Donors received a voucher to buy food and were invited to take a drink from a bottle of brandy kept for the occasion. As the siege tightened and living conditions worsened, each donation could also earn a tin of beef. The exchange connected a technically organized medical effort to the material pressures of wartime Madrid without diminishing the significance of the blood freely given.

In little more than three days, donations filled the largest refrigerator then available, while the queue continued to form each morning on the even-numbered side of Príncipe de Vergara Street. Bethune reported his uncertainty about how many weeks the citrated blood would remain in good condition in the refrigerator. The stocked bottles were not simply a reserve: they were the essential supply for the mobile equipment the Institute was preparing to take to the front.

From collection to the front

On 23 December 1936, Bethune’s team filled the portable-unit bottles with blood of all groups, loaded the packs into a truck, and drove to the Hospital de Sangre de la Casa de Campo. At the front, Bethune examined soldiers who were dying on the floor and chose a young man suffering from hypovolemic shock after massive blood loss. The Spanish doctor treating him considered the case hopeless. A translator explained that the bald Canadian, who spoke no Spanish, wanted permission to try to revive the soldier. The hospital director authorized the attempt skeptically, remaining to watch because he expected the patient to die regardless.

The drive’s purpose thus extended beyond assembling a stock of blood in Madrid. It created a means to move that stock, with the instruments and fluids needed for transfusion, directly to front-line casualties. Its practical force depended on the whole chain: volunteer recruitment, blood grouping and labelling, preservation in a refrigerator, portable equipment, and a truck journey to a hospital near the fighting. The evidence establishes the effort and the choice of a patient regarded as beyond recovery; its importance lies in bringing a new, organized method of transfusion into that emergency setting.

Continuation after Bethune

Bethune’s departure did not end the Institute’s work. On 11 January, after visiting Guillermo García Medina at the Hospital de San Carlos to say goodbye, Bethune asked him to take charge of the mobile service. Bethune planned to tour other fronts with his team, while Spanish personnel would keep the Institute operating in Madrid. The request passed responsibility from the Canadian organizer to a doctor already working in the city’s hospitals.

García Medina later described how an article in El Heraldo, together with pressure from Dr. Quintanilla, helped persuade the hospital administration to support the service. Bethune’s method was so straightforward that García Medina trained half a dozen mobile units in less than a month without leaving his hospital post. When the units began visiting the fronts around Madrid, Dr. Quintanilla appointed him head of the transfusion service established at San Carlos with a refrigerator donated by Canadians. The operation therefore persisted in two connected forms: mobile units carried transfusions toward the fighting, while the hospital maintained a fixed service and storage capacity.

The drive also left consequences beyond its medical organization. García Medina’s rescue of José Moya at Aravaca brought him repeated visits from Moya, who often arrived bearing what he could obtain: apples, cigarettes, or a tin of Russian meat. García Medina tried to stop these gifts because acquiring them cost Moya more effort than the doctor’s need warranted, but he could not stem the gratitude. The story presents such exchanges as one consequence of the rescue alongside the public attention given to the transfusion work.

Significance

The Institute’s work linked an international mission to local participation. Bethune’s arrival depended on Canadian government arrangements and fundraising; the service then relied on Madrileños who donated blood, Spanish staff who helped run it, and hospital personnel who adopted and extended the mobile method. A transformed apartment, a refrigerator filled within days, and a line of volunteers each morning mark the transition from an ambitious plan to a working operation.

The episode’s significance also rests in continuity rather than in a single arrival or demonstration. Bethune moved on, but the Institute remained active, García Medina organized additional mobile units, and the transfusion service at San Carlos continued with Canadian-donated equipment. The drive made cooperation tangible: blood given in Madrid could be preserved, labelled, and carried toward soldiers in immediate danger, while the organization built around that process survived its founding doctor’s departure.