The International Committee of Military Medicine, pursuing further its campaign to obtain improvement in the conditions of aid to the wounded and sick during wartime, has studied, through its Medico-Legal Commission, the position of medicine in the international order.
During armed conflicts physicians find themselves with a mission to fulfil which is unique in its extent and complex in its moral grandeur. In all epochs of civilization it has been an axiom of the most elementary international law that "hostes dum vulnerati fratres" (enemies when wounded become brothers). Since the nineteenth century, which saw the first international codification of duties involved in the organization of aid to the wounded, in the form of the Red Cross Convention, this concept has continued to advance, and it is consoling to observe that in spite of all the setbacks of political rapprochment, whether in the League of Nations or in the United Nations