This chapter focusses on the enthusiasm of the conference delegates for the founding of a global health organisation: the future League of Red Cross Societies. It investigates the differences in visions that conference delegates and Davison had over the shape and functions of the organisation that they were hoping would be born from Cannes. Although Davison's plan would prevail, investigating these differences is fruitful to think about how the Cannes Medical Conference served to legitimise a future organisation whose architecture had been conceived on the other side of the Atlantic before the delegates assembled. A central point of agreement in the debates held to define a future global organisation that would have public health as part of its mission statement was the importance of the circulation and dissemination of medical knowledge. This chapter reveals why the Cannes Medical Conference placed so much emphasis on the sharing of knowledge between experts at international level, as well as the sharing of basic medical and public health knowledge with local populations, through branches of Red Cross national societies. It shows how the circulation of scientific knowledge was a major driving force for the creation of the League of Red Cross Societies and its missions, representing the dawn of a new era for the Red Cross movement and global public health.

Channelling Conference Delegates’ Enthusiasm

Besides their medical background, there are two observations one can make about the delegates of the Cannes Medical Conference. The first is that delegates were all supportive – if not extremely enthusiastic – of the need to create a new institution as envisaged by Davison. Asking medical staff if there was a need for a transnational organisation to improve global public health would hardly have resulted in a different opinion.

When sighting a red cross or a red crescent on a white flag on a mast, a ship, a truck, or an armband, almost everyone would instantly identify the emblems of the Red Cross Red Crescent movement. They are symbols of protection that epitomise the most identifiable humanitarian network of all. That network is also the largest of its kind, with a Red Cross or Red Crescent national society present in 191 of the 193 countries that are member states of the United Nations. Partly as a result of its reach and scale, it is virtually impossible to provide accurate data on the number of staff, volunteers, donors and people who contribute to or benefit from the work of the Red Cross Red Crescent movement through its local branches. Such numbers would be counted in the hundreds of millions, meaning that the Red Cross Red Crescent movement is a distinctive feature of human experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is all the more remarkable because the movement started from modest origins, with the vision of businessman turned philanthropist Henry Dunant, and the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) in 1863.

This book explores a specific moment in the history of the Red Cross Red Crescent movement when its missions and ambitions were transformed and were radically and permanently broadened at the Cannes Medical Conference of 1919. Today, people across the world associate the Red Cross Red Crescent with a wide range of humanitarian activities that greatly vary from one national context to another. Providing assistance to wounded soldiers, prisoners of war, and displaced, starving or sick civilians; assisting in national emergencies and relief operations during natural and human disasters; ambulance services, collecting blood or administering vaccinations, running hospitals, providing first aid at sporting and other events: the list of what Red Cross Red Crescent organisations do is extensive. But this was not always the Red Cross way. In fact, initially, the ambitions of the movement were limited to the battlefield.

The Soviet Union successfully mounted the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to an intercontinental ballistic missile and launched the pair into space on October 4, 1957. Americans watched with shock. The feat symbol¬ized a masculinity crisis at home and abroad as anxiety grew over the satel¬lite's capabilities. However, fear did not consume aerospace engineer Dorothy “Dottie” Lee. She was “thrilled” and understood that Sputnik's launch meant more funding for the NACA. The NACA recruited Lee in 1948 to work as a mathematician at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later Langley Research Center) in Hampton, Virginia. Lee pored through physics books as a child, dreaming of one day landing on the moon. While she did not go to the moon, Lee and hundreds of other women benefited from World War II and the Cold War's demand for computers—people who completed com¬plex mathematical equations to allow engineers time to focus on research projects. The American cultural assumption was that women were better equipped for repetitive computing tasks as opposed to “creative thinking” with technology.

Lee worked in Langley's Pilotless Aircraft Research Division or PARD. The division was headed by future spacecraft designers Dr. Robert Gilruth and Dr. Maxime Faget. Faget assumed that Lee had secretarial skills and asked her to work in his office while his secretary honeymooned. Lee was a self-professed poor typist. She took the job anyway for the opportunity to work with a brilliant aerospace designer. Lee spent her time in Faget's office solving complex equations for an engineer. An impressed Faget asked her to work for him full-time. She became an engineer—which was rare for women at Langley. At times, Lee worked until midnight with the “rush and thrill of trying to solve a problem.” Her friendship with Faget lasted a lifetime.

On July 20, 2021, 82-year-old Wally Funk blasted into space aboard Blue Origin's first crewed spaceflight. The flight was part of the Federal Aviation Administration's “Commercial Astronaut Wings Program.” The craft, The New Shepard, named after the first American in space, Alan B. Shepard, reached over sixty-two miles above the Earth's surface. The New Shepard crossed the Karman line defined by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale as “space.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of Blue Origin, invited Funk to join the mission, along with his brother Mark and 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen. Funk became the oldest woman to “fly” into space. Funk waited almost sixty years for her chance for spaceflight. Funk's fight for spaceflight reminds us that “the past is never dead. It's not even past.” For instance, historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues that the United States’ modern civil rights movements were not confined to a series of successful events from the 1950s until the late 1960s. Rather, the struggle for civil rights is part of a “long civil rights movement” of individual agency and hidden voices that often conflicted with conservative movements. Gender and the Race for Space views the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the American public discourse at the height of the space race as emblematic of progressive and conservative parallel narratives. NASA and the public discourse embraced progress and change in social inequalities, especially in terms of gender and race. Yet, at the same time, the agency high-lighted conventionally conservative values pertaining to gender and race. Women and minority voices at NASA reflected “peaks and valleys of human behavior. The tough times they see are just part of a valley. That mountain¬top (to co-opt Dr. King's metaphor) is still within sight.”

This final chapter considers how the Cannes Medical Conference set up the League of Red Cross Societies to be the Red Cross's peacetime body, with a focus on public health prevention, training and coordination for Red Cross activity across the world. Through further dissection of the work of conference delegates, it analyses how their proposed resolutions shaped the League's early activities in the 1920s, and the key prerogatives that the League of Red Cross Societies bestowed upon itself both to differentiate itself from the ICRC and to complement Red Cross national societies effectively. Instead of being reactive to conflict or preparing for conflict, the chapter argues that the League of Red Cross Societies proposed to diversify Red Cross activities to focus on the prevention of major public health issues of the time. This was a significant paradigm shift for the Red Cross Red Crescent movement. With regard to public health, prevention was judged to be far more effective and less costly than the task of curbing epidemics. Besides practical recommendations such as changes in legislation or direct support to certain populations, all working parties of the conference placed major importance on the circulation of knowledge. Chapter 5 outlines the workings and outcomes of the Cannes Medical Conference and how these transformed the Red Cross movement, proving a turning point towards a new phase of its existence.

The Seven Sections of the Cannes Medical Conference

Alongside plenary sessions where all conference delegates gathered, the Cannes Medical Conference ran seven working groups called ‘sections’, each working on a specific public health issue. The plenary sessions aimed to discuss the contours of the future Red Cross organisation Davison sought to establish: what it would do, its structure, its name and other fundamentals. Section work, however, focussed on specific topics.

List of Delegates at the Cannes Medical Conference

The order of presentation and the acronyms appear as reported in the Proceedings published by the League of Red Cross Societies in 1919.

Great Britain

S. Lyle Cummins, Colonel, C. M. G., A. M. S., Adviser in Pathology, British Armies in France; Professor of Pathology, R. A. M. P. College, London.

L. W. Harrison, Brevet Colonel, R. A. M. C., D. S. O., K. H. P., Lecturer in Venereal Diseases, Military Hospital, Rochester Row; Adviser in Venereal Diseases, Army Medical Department, London, S.W.

Edward C. Hort, F. R. C. P., Edinburgh, Hon. Lt. Colonel, R. A. M. C., Late Director of Bacteriological Laboratory, Addington Park Enteric Hospital.

Dr. Henry Kenwood, C. M. G., D. P. H., F. R. S. E., Professor of Hygiene and Public Health with the University of London: President of Soc. of Med. Officers of Health of Great Britain; Medical Officer of Health for County of Bedfordshire, England.

Truby King, C. M. G., M. B., B Sc., (Public Health) Edinburgh, Lecturer on Mental Diseases at University of Otago (N. Z.): General President, Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children.

Sir John Lumsden, K. B. E., M. D., Vice Chairman and Director-in-Chief, Joint War Committee of B. R. C. S. and Order of St. John in Ireland; Senior Physician, Mercer's Hospital, Dublin.

N. Kay Menzies, M. D., F. R. C. P. E., D. P. H., etc., Principal Assistant Medical Officer. Public Health Department, London County Council.

Sir Arthur Newsholme, K. C. B., M. D., Fellow and Milroy Lecturer of the Royal College of Physicians; Late Principal Medical Officer of the Local Government Board; Member of Council of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, etc.

It was only supposed to be a test. But for the families of command pilot Gus Grissom, senior pilot Ed White and rookie astronaut pilot Roger B. Chaffee, January 27, 1967, was a nightmare. At approximately 6:31 p.m., after spend¬ing five hours atop a non-fueled Saturn B rocket at Cape Kennedy, an Apollo 1's astronaut's voice radioed to the Saturn blockhouse in a “casual tone[s], Fire […] I smell fire.” A couple of moments later, White cried out, “Fire in the cockpit.” A “hysterical shout, ‘There's a bad fire in the spacecraft!’” Eleven seconds of silence passed and the “shrill voice” of Chaffee cried out again, “We’re on fire—get us out of here!”

The engineers and astronauts at the blockhouse heard cries of excruciat¬ing pain as flames engulfed the craft. The only escape route, the hatch door, was sealed shut. Veteran space reporter, John Noble Wilford, described the Apollo 1 astronauts’ last moments as “scrambling, clawing, and pounding to open the sealed hatch […]. There was no automatic release button”—one of the very few automatic components North American Aviation (later North American Rockwell) engineers failed to design. NASA made the decision to bolt both the outer and inner hatch doors during the test. The combination of scorching heat, malfunctioning gas masks, toxic smoke and fears of an explosion left the ground crew helpless to intervene. The only way for the astro¬nauts to open the hatch was to use the ratchet that was secured directly above the astronauts’ heads. It would have taken the astronauts ninety seconds to open the hatch with the tool. The astronauts did not have ninety seconds as the hatch heated up to over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit within a few seconds. While inspecting the craft after the fire, technicians found the skin of the astronauts’ melted fingertips on the hatch door. The Apollo 1 astronauts were the first to die aboard a spacecraft.

In 1996 historian John F. Hutchinson noted that ‘[t]he Cannes conference did exactly what Davison wanted: it put the scientific stamp of approval on his vision of the future’ of the Red Cross Red Crescent movement. Immediately after the conference, Davison cabled that the ‘conference closed under conditions which are almost thrilling as manifestations of appreciation and approval of programme have gone quite beyond my fondest hope – resolutions passed will frame foundation for world work which I have no hesitation in predicting will become historical’. If success is assessed in relation to the goals of those who organised and supported the conference – key among them Henry P. Davison, William P. Strong and Woodrow Wilson from a distance – Cannes was a resounding success. Davison's plan for a new organisation in the Red Cross world focussing on the betterment of public health was met with enthusiasm by leading scientific and medical figures of the time, and it was subsequently approved and birthed by five prominent Red Cross national societies who gathered at Hotel Regina, in Paris, on 5 May 1919. Conference delegates fully supported Davison's intuition that while the war was over, staff and goodwill for the Red Cross should not be lost to demobilisation but redeployed towards public health. Delegates concluded that ‘no other organisation is so well prepared to undertake these great responsibilities at the present time as the Red Cross, and no movement better deserves the hearty and enthusiastic support of all people than does this’. This vision, however, required a significant shift in mentality within the Red Cross movement, a step that the ICRC was not interested in taking, preferring instead to focus on wartime humanitarianism, international law and post-war reconstruction, thus remaining true to its historical roots.

Is there a decline of the West? The impression shared by many that we are going through a period of crisis of the values and fundamental principles on which our culture has long been based, has distant roots, which the most serious economic crisis of 2008 has only amplified and made tangible in the lives of millions of people. It started with the end of the “great narratives” and the collapse of ideologies that Jean-François Lyotard (1979) spoke of in relation to post-modernism. It was the 1970s and it was yet to manifest itself in the more drastic “liquefaction” of society indicated by Zygmunt Bauman, who admirably described the dissolution of a consolidated system, identifiable with modernity, and which involved economic relations, social relations, and the very legitimacy of the nation-states born from the Peace of Westphalia onward.

It is the latest “decline,” the one that concerns us directly, but which follows several moments of crisis that are dispersed in the distant past. Beginning with the controversial vision of Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West (1918): a “cursed” book, to which we owe the pessimistic definition of a world in ruins that awaits a vitalistic and, perhaps, authoritarian rebirth.

In the decade (2006–2016) during which I had the pleasure of meeting and frequenting Zygmunt Bauman, especially during his trips to Italy, where he used to come frequently, there were many occasions to be together at the table, but only once did the extraordinary case of having lunch at his home, in Leeds, and being “served” by him personally occur. It happened on May 2, 2014, on the occasion of the publication of State of Crisis, which we had written together.

That day was a memorable one: having arrived by bus on Otley Road, a four-lane boulevard that runs from the center of Leeds to the suburbs, I got off near the junction with Lawnswood Gardens, a very green residential area surrounded by a copse. Nice sunny day (which is rare for England).

I set out to find house number 1, his address. No sign, no plaque or doorbell, just a hedge surrounding a few two-storey houses and the first, hidden by a garden overgrown with vegetation. Puzzled, I don't know what to do, yet that is the right address where Bauman lives, no doubt about it. After pacing back and forth, futilely searching for some clue, I decided to resort to an ancient yet unorthodox method: calling out loud, “Zygmunt!” Immediately, I hear his voice from the house inviting me in. I pass through the gate and make my way through the foliage, following a barely noticeable passage through the grass, I see him appear at the door together with Alexandra Kania, his second wife.