Care and evacuation of wounded soldiers on the battlefield: the contribution of Pierre-François Percy's (1754–1825) würsts, horse-drawn ambulances

At the end of the 18th century, casualties in battles involving several hundred thousand men were significant, attributable as much if not more to the loss of wounded soldiers due to poor quality care than to deaths in combat. One of the reasons was not so much the lack of surgeons as the late arrival of medical assistance, which only intervened at the end of the battle. It was during the Revolution and especially during the wars of the First Empire (1804-1815) that access to the wounded on the battlefield – a kind of medicalisation of the front line – and their evacuation were organised thanks to the innovations of Pierre-François Percy who formed a corps of ‘mobile’ surgeons and nurses who were taken to the battlefield, as close as possible to the front line, with surgical equipment, in search of wounded soldiers who were then transported by its würsts (introduced into the Rhine Army in 1799), a type of horse-drawn caisson, which were abandoned around 1810 because they could only transport the lightly wounded. It was not until after the Battle of Solferino, which pitted Napoleon III (1808–1873) against Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830–1916), before Henry Dunant, horrified by the fate of the wounded who were often left to die, founded the Red Cross and signed the first Geneva Convention on 22 August 1864, entitled ‘Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field’.