Introduction

Legal protections for the wounded and medical staff in war have existed in the modern era since the First Geneva Convention of 1864.1 Henri Dunant is rightly credited with leading the campaign to establish medical relief for casualties of war after his experience of seeing the abandonment of the wounded following Imperial France’s defeat of Austria at the Battle of Solferino in 1859.2 Dunant described his experience in his 1862 book A Memory of Solferino and called for the creation of voluntary medical societies underpinned by the principle of humanity.2

However, Dunant’s vision centred solely on the role of voluntary medical societies and ‘said nothing about the rules of war’, including the need for legal protections for the wounded or medical staff.1 Instead, Dutch army surgeon Johan Hendrik Christiaan Basting (1817–1870) was arguably the progenitor of legal protections that would ‘guarantee the protection of (medical) volunteers and declare that medical personnel be considered neutral in conflict, as they play an exclusively humanitarian role’.1

Despite Basting’s influence over international protections for medical personnel in war that extend to contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL), he is little known (especially compared with Dunant) even in the Netherlands. This short paper aims to outline the life and legacy of Johan Hendrik Christiaan Basting (pictured in Figure 1).