Louis Appia

Louis Paul Amédée Appia (13 October 1818 - 1 May 1898) was a Swiss surgeon with special merit in the area of military medicine. In 1863 he became a member of the Geneva "Committee of Five", which was the precursor to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Six years later he met Clara Barton, an encounter which had significant influence on Clara Barton's subsequent endeavours to found a Red Cross society in the United States and her campaign for an accession of the US to the Geneva Convention of 1864.

Appia's parents, Paul Joseph Appia and Caroline Develey, originally came from Piedmont. His father, who had been a University student in Geneva, nevertheless became an evangelical pastor in 1811 in Hanau near Frankfurt am Main. Louis was the third of six children. He went to Gymnasium (high school) in Frankfurt and at eighteen gained the Hochschulreife diploma in Geneva. In 1838 he began to study medicine in Heidelberg and concluded his medical doctorate in 1843, after which he returned to Frankfurt.

In 1848, he assisted the wounded in Paris and Frankfurt during the February revolution in France and the March revolution in the German states. Afterwards, his specialty and focus became the improvement of the application of medicine to the war-wounded. After the death of his father in 1849, he traveled with his mother to Geneva and began to practice as a surgeon. In connection with his work on military medicine, he developed an instrument to immobilize a broken arm or leg during the transport of a wounded individual. He also wrote a treatise about surgical treatment for the war-wounded. In 1853, he married Anne Caroline Lassere and during their marriage had two sons (Paul and Adolphe) and two daughters (Helene and Marie). His son Adolphe Appia became an architect and was a pioneer of modern stage design.

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