Aaron Rothstein is a third-year medical student at the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Hamas launches rockets from hospitals. Israeli hospitals treat the family of Gaza’s ruler. The Lancet, true to form, publishes an attack on Israel.
“Here is a hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness,” wrote Henri Dunant, a nineteenth-century international activist, in his book A Memory of Solferino. The book concerns the Battle of Solferino in June of 1859 between the Austrians and the French. Dunant describes the combatants “trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with sabre and bayonet.”
An 1897 illustration depicting ambulance corps from
Russia (left) and England (right).
Image via Shutterstock
But amidst these horrors, Dunant gives us at least some hope in the form of the field hospitals. As a volunteer there, he points out that French surgeons did not rest for more than twenty-four hours, amputating legs and taking care of soldiers, eventually fainting from exhaustion. And this was not just done for French soldiers. Dunant observes that many wounded Austrians and Hungarians were “given the same food as the French officers, and their wounded were treated by the same doctors.” In the hospitals only the soldiers’ uniforms on the shelves above their beds, not the quality of the care they received, indicated which side they fought for.
After witnessing this, Dunant proposed that the international community establish relief societies composed of volunteers and sanctioned by a convention that would govern the treatment of the wounded during wartime. His proposal drew huge international support and on August 22, 1864, 16 countries signed onto the first treaty of the Geneva Conventions which, in its first article, reads that “Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognized as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick. Neutrality shall end if the said ambulances or hospitals should be held by a military force.”
Implied in this law is a principal far more ancient, one embodied in the physician’s Hippocratic Oath. In it, the doctor swears, “in every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself from all intentional ill-doing….” The physician, therefore, is responsible only for the good of the patient no matter what uniform that patient may wear. The Oath makes no exception for wartime or for the treatment of an enemy. Even if physicians disagree about who be