The Biography of a New Canadian Family

About the Book

The photograph from the air of the University of Montreal, built (1928-1945) on Mount-Royal by Quebec-born Architect/Engineer Ernest Cormier, (1885- 1980), trained in Paris. That whole period was very important for developing the Province of Quebec. The building was built on the north-side of the Mountain with the enormous old cemetery easily visible and the St. Lawrence river just visible on the other side. Today, such a photograph would no longer be so striking, the whole area has many more impressive buildings and enormous trees cover the area.

We lived a ten minute walk away from the bottom left-hand corner of the picture in Outremont, the francophone counterpart of Anglophone Westmount two miles of so to the west. The head office of Family Medicine was situated close to and just to the west of the big tower. It is from there that the Bethune/Chinese connection was established. I was at the UofM from 1975-1995. It was by far the most productive period of our professional lives.

About the Author

A Happy and Informative Present: at the new Université de Sherbrooke, Pierre had developed a four-month teaching program for clinical nurses prior to their departure to the Canadian Far North where they would be in charge of a Nursing Station. In 1973, a group of them gave me as a parting gift the French translation of “The Scalpel and the Sword” by Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon (Toronto, 1952); the French version was by Jean Pare, 'Docteur Bethune' (Montreal, 1973). As new Canadians, we thought it odd that the French version should take 20 years to appear on the scene. We had been in Canada for 15 years. In 1975, Pierre's career led him to 1'hospitaldu Sacré-Coeur where Dr. Bethune worked for over three years (1933-1936), his first experience in a non-English environment before going to Spain and China where he died in 1939. He became my last model. During the last seven years of his life Dr Bethune was able to adapt in a masterful way to three completely different important complex situations on three different continents (January 1936 November 1939). On the social side, Joan became secretary of the Montreal-based Norman Bethune Foundation. A year later, Pierre became its fourth Chairman, eventually becoming responsible for a professional exchange program between Montreal and China, working most of the time at the Bethune International Peace Hospital in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province (19891994). Joan was responsible for a TESL program, Pierre for a medical teaching program. Note: Joan is the note-taker, keeping a daily agenda since 1960 without interruptions! Pierre took lots of pictures and accumulated written stuff all classified and in sequence, in about fifty tightly packed binders.