This native of Alsace founded the Médecins sans frontières association in 1971, with his friend Bernard Kouchner. He passed away on Wednesday January 1st.
It’s difficult to choose one word to sum up Louis Schittly. Anarchist, writer, son of a peasant… The co-founder of Médecins sans frontières (MSF), launched in 1971, died on Wednesday January 1 in Mulhouse at the age of 86, reports France 3 Grand Est. In 1999, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his association, which still today continues to provide emergency care to populations in distress. Like those of the war in the Middle East or the victims of the recent cyclone of Chido in Mayotte.
Born in Alsace in 1938 and in love with his region, Louis Schittly was born into a peasant family in Bernwiller, a town marked by the devastation of the First World War.
As soon as he finished his medical studies in Strasbourg then in Lille, he joined the Red Cross in 1968 to take care of hospitals in Biafra, a region of Nigeria ravaged by war. There, he meets doctors, who like him “are a little crazy and don’t want to settle down with a plate, to get the money”summarizes his friend Vincent Froelhy for France Bleu.
“Rabbit Doctor”
Marked by the horrors of war, the doctor created GIMCU, the Emergency Medical-Surgical Intervention Group, on his return to France in 1970 with his friend Bernard Kouchner. Which became MSF the following year, for Doctors Without Borders. With the humanitarian association, the mustachioed caregiver multiplies missions, traveling the world and war zones. Throughout his life, Louis Schittly traveled to Ivory Coast, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Mali, Serbia and even South Sudan, France 3 list.
Apart from his life as a doctor, Louis Schittly, a great defender of Alsatian, also wrote bilingual tales and made a documentary, The Godmother (D’Goda)defending the small peasantry and a return to self-sufficiency. He who had traveled the world, at the end of his life finally resettled on his family farm in Bernwiller where he worked as a field doctor, or “Rabbit Doctor” as he liked to say. According to France 3, it is in this town of some 1,200 inhabitants that his funeral will be held on Saturday afternoon.
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