Un souvenir de Solferino Soft cover - 1862

Geneva: Imprimerie Jules-Guillaume Fick, 1862. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Near Fine. 1st Edition. Soft cover. 4to (276 x 178 mm). [4] [1] 2-115 [1] pp., including half-title and double-page chromolithograph map drawn by B. Müller from the author's instructions and lithographed by Pilet & Cougnard, Geneva. Original publisher's printed wrappers, all pages uncut (slight wear of paper over spine with little chipping at spine ends, very light spotting and soiling, lower wrapper with slight chipping of brown paper coating and partial splitting of fold). Internally only little age-toned at outer margins, otherwise crisp, clean and without any markings. Provenance: from a Frenche private collection. An extremely well preserved, completely unsophisticated copy. ---- FIRST EDITION, AND EXCEPTIONALLY RARE IN THE ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPPERS. "On 24 June 1859 the Battle of Solferino - one of the bloodiest of the nineteenth century - was fought between the Austrians and the French-Piedmontese alliance. Dunant, a Swiss philanthropist, witnessed the battle and its dreadful aftermath, in which the nearly 40,000 casualties were left to die with no medical treatment except what he and the local inhabitants could provide them. Upon returning to Geneva Dunant published Un souvenir de Solferino, an account of the horrors he had seen coupled with an appeal for "some international principle, with the sanction of an inviolable convention, which... might constitute a basis for the relief of the wounded in the various countries of Europe." The wide interest generated by Dunant's book led in 1863 to the formation of a committee which later became the International Red Cross, and in 1864 to the establishment of the Geneva Convention. Dunant shared with Frédéric Passy the first Noble Peace Prize in 1901" (Norman 670). "The first edition of Un Souvenir de Solferino consisted of sixteen hundred copies printed in November 1862 for private distribution. Only four hundred of these were actually distributed; these copies, constituting the original issue, have a title page stating 'Ne se vend pas' above the imprint. A month later, in December 1862, Dunant had another thousand copies bound with a title page indicating 'deuxième édition'. The third edition, in which Dunant suggested the extension of Red Cross services to victims of natural disasters, appeared in 1863. An English translation was published by the American Red Cross in 1939." (Haskell Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 73, p. 269). References: PMM 350; Norman 670; Garrison-M 2166; Grolier/Medicine 73; Waller 2639; Heirs of Hippocrates, 1945; En Français dans le Texte 284. - Visit our website to see more images!