Dr. Louis Paul Amédée Appia

Louis Paul Amédée Appia was born in Hanau, Germany, of Piedmontese Waldensian heritage. Studying medicine at the University of Heidelberg, he received his doctorate in 1843 before settling in Geneva as an expert surgeon. Deeply interested in military surgery, Appia rushed to Italy in 1849 and again during the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, treating wounded soldiers in field hospitals after the battles of Magenta and Solferino.

Appia invented an innovative apparatus for immobilizing and transporting soldiers with fractured bones from the battlefield, publishing his influential military surgery treatise Le chirurgien à l'ambulance in 1859. When Henri Dunant published his account of Solferino in 1862, Appia was appointed to the historic 'Committee of Five' in Geneva in February 1863 to translate humanitarian ideals into concrete battlefield realities.

In February 1864, when war broke out between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, Appia traveled to the front as the Red Cross's first official delegate. On the battlefields of Dybbøl, wearing the white armband bearing the red cross on his left arm, Appia distributed bandages, performed emergency operations on Prussian and Danish soldiers, and established the neutral protection of medical workers in combat. He later joined Giuseppe Garibaldi's campaigns in 1866 as a neutral surgeon and remained an active ICRC member until his death in 1898.