From the dust cover

The Red Cross was the inspiration – the dream – of Henri Dunant, a thirty-one-year-old Swiss businessman appalled by the butchery and lack of medical care for injured soldiers he came across, almost by chance, during the battle of Solferino in 1859. With Gustave Moynier, another Swiss, Dunant set out to create an international organization which would not only alter the fate of all those wounded in war, but which moved rapidly to establish humanitarian law, begin refugee work, improve prison conditions and track down those parted by warfare. [...]

Caroline Morehead is the first writer to be granted unparalleled access to the Red Cross archives in Geneva, which have been closed for over a hundred years. Her book traces the origins of the Red Cross, its works furing the wars of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its response to natural disasters, including its most contentious and political interventions, and describes the men and women delegates who became the historians and monitors of war. [...]

It is the only authoritative book on its subject by a writer of real distinction and wide experience in the field of human rights.

 

From the preface

[...]
Dunant's Dream is a book about the people --- eccentric adventurers, moralists, visionaries and canny political manipulators --- who shaped the International Committee's identity and saw and recognized their own dreams in Dunant's creation. There is something fascinating as well as admirable about those whose lives revolve around the misfortunes of others. It is also a book about war, and what successive generations have thought could and should be done to control it and to lessen the sufferings it causes.