In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r t w o Transatlantic Transplant The red cross movement began as a wartime expression of humanité—a concern for mitigating the suffering of combatants. in 1862, Genevan entrepreneur henri dunant proposed an international conference to create volunteer aid societies for the treatment of the wounded and a universal set of rules under which they would operate. his proposal led to the first Geneva conventions of 1864, a treaty stipulating that in wartime, medical and nursing personnel in a conflict would be granted neutral status , enabling them to aid wounded combatants without being targeted by opposing armies. The treaty also called for the creation of wartime volunteer medical aid societies with the same status; their members would wear white armbands marked with red crosses to identify themselves as neutral actors on the battlefield. These conventions underwent their first major test during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. clara Barton, who had met the movement’s leaders during her stay in Geneva, accompanied the new “red cross” volunteer aid brigades to the front, but she focused her efforts on aiding female civilians affected by the war. This choice on her part presaged the way she later Americanized and feminized the red cross idea. After returning to the United states, Barton pressured the federal government to sign the Geneva conventions, but absent any looming war, her effort foundered. To gain popular support for an American red cross society, Barton proposed a volunteer body whose members would aid citizens of the United states and other nations in time of “national calamity,” as well as assisting the wounded in wartime. in this new effort, Barton transplanted the ideals of humanity and neutrality from the volatile borders between european nations to the turbulent physical and social geography of the burgeoning American state. 22 The Barton Era dunant’s Proposal Like clara Barton, red cross founder henri dunant stumbled into his humanitarian mission. in the summer of 1859, traveling from his native Geneva to the southern Alpine town of solferino, dunant witnessed a colossal battle between French, sardinian , and Austrian troops that left thousands of seriously wounded soldiers to languish on the fields. The one-day engagement, a decisive one in the Wars of italian independence , produced more casualties than the Battle of Antietam, on the bloodiest single day in American military history, did three years later. many of the wounded at solferino had been shot in the neck, the head, or the limbs with the penetrating minié balls from the new-style long-range rifles that soon afterward were used in the American civil War. military surgeons were scarce and medical aid brigades were nonexistent. dunant later described his horror at the “field of carnage,” where soldiers who tried to provide water to wounded comrades were struck down themselves and where, after nightfall, one could hear from the field “the moans, the stifled sighs full of anguish and suffering, the searing voices calling for help.” A deeply religious evangelical Protestant, dunant seized the opportunity to become a Good samaritan. organizing local women and boys to provide food, water, and dressings to the soldiers, he also secured supplies from a nearby town, and he helped some soldiers get to local churches, so they could be laid out and treated. others also organized assistance to the soldiers. in the nearby town of Brescia, “all of those who had carriages at their disposal went out themselves” to collect the wounded, while the townspeople took them into their houses.1 dunant went on to write an impassioned eyewitness account of this experience in an 1862 treatise, Un souvenir de Solferino (A memoir of solferino). he testified to the needless suffering of modern warfare and proposed a plan for mitigating the suffering in the future. in peacetime, he suggested, the countries of europe could form permanent volunteer “aid societies for the wounded” that would gather supplies and provide training for wartime operations. he recommended that an international congress be convened to formulate a set of international, sacred rules to govern the wartime conduct of these aid societies and their protection from attack by the parties to a conflict. dunant urged this project in the name of humanité and civilisation. he used the word humanité to refer to all humans (i.e., “mankind”) but also, in its French enlightenment sense, to refer to the affectively driven impulse to respond to the suffering of others with concerted action. Peppering his prose with references to “tout homme...

Share