He was a surgeon who quarreled with his own profession, an inventor who carried the hospital to the battlefield, a communist in a country that distrusted the word, and a difficult, proud, restless man who became a national hero on the far side of the world. Norman Bethune left Canada because his conscience could not breathe there. In China he found the one place where his deepest belief could finally become action: that medicine must move toward suffering, and that a nation which lets its people wait, and bleed, and go without care is a nation nursing a wound it refuses to close.

This is not only the story of a life. It is the story of an idea that was too early for the country that produced it. Bethune argued, long before it was safe to say so, that health is not a private commodity but a public bloodstream, and that a doctor who guards the gate has betrayed the patient at the door. He was ignored, then admired, then quietly misunderstood. China built him into a legend. Canada built him a statue and forgot what he was trying to say.

Told in vivid, unsentimental prose, this book follows Bethune from the operating rooms of Montreal to the mobile blood units of the Spanish Civil War and finally to the frozen front lines of wartime China, where he died from an infected cut because he had spent his whole life erasing the distance between himself and the wounded. Then it turns the story on its listener. It places Bethune against the present, against waiting lists and shuttered clinics and a public system straining under its own weight, and asks the question he never stopped asking: what, exactly, is medicine for?

A flawed man can still carry a pure idea. Bethune did not merely heal wounds. He asked why society kept producing them. That question still bleeds.