The collaboration between Guillermo Garcia Medina and Norman Bethune

Guillermo García Medina and Norman Bethune’s collaboration turns an urgently practical medical innovation into a lasting partnership: Guillermo learns to collect and preserve blood under Bethune’s instruction, then helps extend transfusion services from the Canadian Institute to Madrid’s fronts and San Carlos Hospital. The work gives Guillermo renewed purpose amid war, while its surviving trace—a photograph of the two doctors—later appears among the objects that reopen his buried family past.

The work that brought them together

After news of the life-saving intervention at Casa de Campo reached San Carlos Hospital, Guillermo’s chief, Fortunato Quintanilla, devoted himself to establishing a small transfusion unit modeled on the Canadian operation on Príncipe de Vergara Street. The hospital’s conservative leadership resisted even though Quintanilla’s professional standing was considerable. A refusal did not end his efforts: drawing on his friendship with Andrés Velázquez, a senior figure in Madrid’s defense administration, he secured an official application to the Canadian Institute.

Quintanilla ordered Guillermo to report to the Institute that afternoon and learn as much as he could. The training placed Guillermo in Bethune’s orbit at a moment when the nearby fronts had settled into a tense calm, and the possibility of preparing for renewed fighting gave the project a clear urgency. Guillermo had already heard that hospital administrators no longer thought the service necessary; he and Quintanilla understood that a lull was precisely the time to prepare for casualties.

Training and the first extraction

The afternoon at the Institute changed more than Guillermo’s technical knowledge. He found Bethune’s work for Madrid deeply moving, and had to steady his emotions to follow explanations given in French. Guillermo describes the experience as restoring the fervent, innocent certainties that had sustained him through the November bombings, before war had made the future seem like a minefield. When Bethune asked whether he knew someone trustworthy who would volunteer for his first extraction, Guillermo said that he did.

That volunteer was Amparo, who had become a close companion. Guillermo told her she must be ready at eight the next morning and must not eat beforehand. At the Institute, he introduced her to Bethune, who greeted him warmly in French. The exchange was also a test of professional composure: this was Guillermo’s first blood extraction, his first procedure performed with instructions in a language other than his own, and his first treatment of someone with whom he had an intimate relationship. Bethune explained the sodium citrate waiting in the bottle, its effect on the blood’s density, the expected flow, and possible complications. Amparo teased Guillermo in Spanish while he worked, making the simple procedure harder for reasons outside medicine; Bethune followed the banter well enough to recognize the intimacy between doctor and patient.

From instruction to a wider service

The collaboration soon extended beyond training. Guillermo recalls that, by the time he returned to Madrid, he felt as if he had spent half a lifetime transfusing soldiers who had been given up for dead. Sixteen lives had been saved; five of those cases were his. The first patient remained the most affecting, and before leaving he spoke with the man about the obligation a rescued person might feel toward a rescuer. Bethune’s work thus joined technical instruction to an encounter with the human meaning of survival.

Guillermo’s association with Bethune also helped overcome San Carlos’s resistance. On 11 January, Bethune came to the hospital to say goodbye before taking his team to other fronts. The Canadian Institute would continue operating with Spanish staff, and Bethune asked Guillermo to take charge of the mobile service. Their meeting fed Republican publicity the following day, giving Guillermo a prominence he felt he had not earned: the method was Bethune’s achievement, and its application was straightforward. In less than a month, however, Guillermo had trained half a dozen mobile units while keeping his hospital post.

As those units began moving across the Madrid fronts, Quintanilla appointed Guillermo head of the transfusion service established at San Carlos. A Canadian donation of a refrigerator made the hospital service possible. Bethune’s departure therefore marked not an end to their practical collaboration but the transfer of its methods into Spanish hands: Guillermo carried what he had learned into a network of mobile teams and a permanent hospital operation.

What remained of the partnership

The novel preserves the collaboration not only through its medical consequences but through material evidence. Years later, Guillermo searches a trunk for papers connected with Amparo and finds, among other documents, a photograph of himself posing with Bethune for the cover of El Heraldo. The picture sits beside his medical degree and political papers, making the Canadian doctor part of the surviving record of Guillermo’s wartime identity. It links the public history of blood transfusion to the private archive through which Guillermo’s family story will eventually return.

The partnership is also remembered through Guillermo’s later account of how the work changed him: Bethune’s teaching strengthened his knowledge of blood and revived convictions damaged by bombardment and uncertainty. The relationship therefore has two consequences that the narrative keeps in view. It equips Guillermo to extend a medical service when the next wave of casualties comes, and it gives him a renewed sense of purpose during a war that continually unsettles his personal life. What begins as an urgent lesson at the Institute becomes both an organized hospital practice and one of the durable memories preserved in Guillermo’s papers.