How did the Red Cross get its name?

The Red Cross is named after a flag, and nobody wrote down why the flag looks the way it does.

The story starts with Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who saw the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino on 24 June 1859. The ICRC says more than 45,000 soldiers were left dead, wounded or abandoned. Dunant's 1862 book, A Memory of Solferino, called for volunteer relief groups and legal protection for battlefield medical workers.

On 26 October 1863, a conference in Geneva with delegates from 14 governments adopted "the red cross on a white background" as one distinctive emblem. It had to be simple, easy to see from far away, and the same for friend and foe. The First Geneva Convention recognized it in August 1864.

The popular explanation is that it is the Swiss flag with its colors reversed, and the ICRC repeats it. The ICRC says the reversal reflected Switzerland's neutral status. A 1937 expert conference also stated that the cross "has no religious significance, as it represents the inverted heraldic colours of the Swiss federal flag."

The ICRC's own historical blog says the real story is more complicated. The white ground came first: it had long stood for peace, and in 1857 the French military doctor Lucien Baudens had proposed white to mark medical staff. No surviving record explains the choice of a cross. The historian François Bugnion suggests it was picked because it was simple, easy to reproduce and carried centuries of symbolism. The blog also notes that the Swiss flag's cross itself has Christian roots, so calling the emblem purely secular is shaky.

That debate has had real consequences. During the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire used a red crescent instead. Wikipedia says its government believed the cross would alienate its Muslim soldiers. Nearly every national society in a majority-Muslim country later adopted the crescent, and these are called Red Crescent societies.

The organization's name was set in 1875. Its original body, the International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded, was renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross, so that the emblem became the name.