Image, Word, Allegory and Story: The Tuberculosis Mural of Dr. Norman Bethune

Jean S. Mason (Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

This presentation will explore the narrative interface between image and word in a little known monumental mural painting by Dr. Norman Bethune. Bethune is best remembered as the maverick Canadian doctor who brought medicine to the front lines of anti-fascist resistance in Spain and China during the 1930’s. A less known and researched area of Bethune’s life is his ordeal as a tuberculosis patient in the United States while in his mid-thirties—the experience that prompted his revolutionary zeal. While curing from TB, Bethune created a sixty-foot mural of colorful images and short poems that represent an allegory of his life and his transformational struggle with TB. The original mural was lost under mysterious circumstances; however, photographic plates of the mural were discovered recently. In this presentation, I will show digitized color images of Bethune’s mural and discuss how Bethune uses an interplay between the visual and the verbal to construct a dynamic narrative that reveals aspects of the creative and healing processes underlying both the mural-making and Bethune’s transformation from ambitious doctor to medical humanitarian.