Louis Appia

Louis Paul Amedee Appia was a Swiss surgeon with special merit in military medicine, born on 13 October 1818 in Hanau and died on 1 May 1898. He studied medicine at Heidelberg, took his doctorate in 1843, and began practising as a surgeon in Geneva after 1849. He developed an instrument to immobilize a broken limb during the transport of the wounded and wrote a treatise on the surgical treatment of gunshot wounds, published as The Ambulance Surgeon. In 1859 he worked in field hospitals in northern Italy during the Austro-Sardinian War. In 1863 he joined the Geneva Committee of Five, the precursor of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and his later meeting with Clara Barton influenced her campaign for American accession to the Geneva Convention.