Bei Xiu'en's first frozen blood transfusion

The first successful refrigerated-blood transfusion in the novel takes place on December 23, 1936, at the frontline Hospital de Sangre de la Casa de Campo. There, Norman Bethune uses blood stored in advance to revive a soldier considered beyond saving. The breakthrough changes transfusion from a procedure dependent on a donor’s immediate presence into a practical way to carry blood to the wounded—and, in the scene’s most irrepressible turn, gives the unnamed survivor the chance to claim his own return to life.

Preparation and Frontline Setting

By the morning of the attempt, Bethune’s team has blood of all groups ready in portable equipment. They load the packs into a truck and head for the hospital at Casa de Campo, taking the stored blood directly to a place where soldiers are dying in the front line. The action depends on a chain of preparation: blood collected and kept available beforehand, equipment that can be carried, and a physician willing to test the method on a patient whose condition appears hopeless.

The scene places the technical innovation amid the immediate demands of wartime medicine. Bethune examines soldiers lying on the floor, many already judged beyond help, and quickly selects a young man suffering from hypovolemic shock after massive blood loss. The Spanish doctor treating him has given up. The patient breathes faintly; his skin is pale, damp, and cold, stretched across sunken cheeks, and his lips have lost their color. The description makes the problem bodily and urgent before the procedure begins: this is not an abstract trial but an attempt to reverse a visible collapse.

The First Transfusion

Bethune does not speak Spanish, so his interpreter approaches the hospital director and explains that the bald foreign doctor wants permission to try to revive the patient. The director responds skeptically; the proposal sounds absurd to him. He nevertheless allows the attempt because he expects the soldier to die anyway, and stays to watch. His reluctant permission establishes the stakes: the intervention has no guarantee of success, and the patient is being treated at a point when ordinary expectation has already turned toward death.

Bethune pricks the soldier’s finger and collects a sample with a glass rod. Once he identifies the blood group, he inserts a needle and begins transfusing the first bottle. The patient moves and opens his eyes, but the initial change is not enough: the blood loss has been too severe. Bethune gives him a second bottle. Before the transfusion is quite finished, the soldier looks at him and smiles. In the scene’s clear reversal, a patient written off as dying responds first with movement, then with recognition and a smile.

A Medical Breakthrough

The narrative identifies the intervention as the first time refrigerated blood has brought a doomed patient back to life. Its practical significance lies in the separation it makes possible between donor and recipient. Transfusion no longer requires the donor to be beside the wounded person, connected directly by two needles and a length of tubing. Blood can be collected, stored, carried, and given where it is needed, making the procedure easier, more convenient, more practical, and more effective.

The account also sets the first survivor within a much larger consequence. Bethune’s discovery saves thousands of soldiers of the People’s Army of the Spanish Republic during the war, and the narration looks beyond the conflict to the countless millions who later benefit from the technique. That scale is deliberately paired with the specificity of this first patient: the unnamed young man’s revival is at once an individual rescue and the opening instance of a medical practice whose reach will extend far beyond that hospital and that morning.

The Survivor and the Hospital’s Celebration

The first survivor’s name is not known. His companions mark his return to life with a cigarette, placing a lit one in his mouth; he draws on it eagerly. Around him, joy and hope sweep through the otherwise bleak field hospital. The response widens from the patient and his companions to the people gathered there, who cheer Canada, the doctor whose surname they find difficult to pronounce, the Republic, the working-class struggle, and international solidarity. The scene presents the medical result not as Bethune’s achievement alone but as a collective moment of relief and affirmation.

The revived soldier then makes his own contribution to the celebration. He cries, “¡Viva yo!” Bethune does not understand the words, but their effect does not depend on translation: they make him the happiest man in the world. The outburst changes the scene’s register without diminishing its seriousness. After the precision of blood typing and the second bottle, the patient’s first reported words assert, with comic force, the value of the life that has just been restored.

Significance in the Novel

The scene connects medical skill to the politics and human stakes of the war. Bethune’s contribution is presented as a gift to Madrid and to those who resist there; the narration associates his work with a city that will continue to endure the siege for nearly three years. Its language of solidarity follows directly from the hospital’s response, where gratitude extends from the Canadian doctor and his country to the Republic and the working-class cause. The procedure is therefore both a concrete medical advance and an act of international aid delivered under fire.

The episode also gives its historical claim a human measure. The hospital director’s skepticism, the patient’s cold and pallid body, the two bottles, the smile, and the cigarette make the transformation legible through actions rather than explanation alone. Yet the survivor remains unnamed. The narrative preserves that absence while making his voice unforgettable: he is not reduced to an example of Bethune’s success, because his shout makes him an active participant in the event. The first refrigerated-blood transfusion is consequently remembered as both a technical turning point and a brief, crowded celebration in which a man declares himself alive.