El socorro humanitario en tiempo de paz: Divergencias iniciales en el movimiento internacional de la cruz roja, 1867-1884

Abstract

When, scarcely five years after its advent, the movement of aid societies for the relief of soldiers wounded in battle in international wars, set out to examine what should their actives be in peacetime, many debates were opened up as to the feasibility of broadening their field of action to other warlike settings and disasters. The following is an examination of how these debates developed, providing evidence that (a) the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) defended its position not to incorporate civil aims into the humanitarian purposes of the Red Cross international movement until after the First World War; and (b) different national societies and committees of the Red Cross, disagreeing with this position, defended, within the framework of emergent paradigms in hygiene and public health, the care of the sick poor, and were involved as early as the 1870s and 1880s in first-aid to the sick and wounded in everyday life as well as in relief of disasters both natural and caused by famine. © 2014 CSIC.