After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, La Fontaine continued working as a writer and bibliographer but also as a politician and diplomat. He was a member of the Belgian delegation present at the Paris Peace Conference and a delegate at the first assembly of the League of Nations (1920–1921). He died in 1943.
Theodore Richards (1868–1928)
1914 Chemistry
In recognition of his accurate determinations of the atomic weight of a large number of chemical elements.
Outside of the work that made him famous, Theodore William Richards had diverse interests and a special appreciation for outdoor activities. Besides golf and sailing, drawing occupied a significant part of his free time. His artistic skills were likely inherited from his father, William T. Richards, who was a well-known landscape painter. His mother, Anna Matlack, was a respected poet and made sure the arts were a part of her son’s upbringing.
Richards spent a large part of his childhood in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but traveled to France and England with his family. He was educated by his mother until the age of 15, when he entered Haverford College. In 1885 he graduated in the sciences and in the same year entered Harvard University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1886 and a Master of Arts and Doctorate in 1888.
Richards spent the following year in Germany, where he studied under some of the greatest chemists of his day. On his return to Harvard, he served as a chemistry assistant until 1901, when he became a full professor. The discoveries he made during the next years of his life were of great importance to the understanding of atoms. Besides many other advances, he developed techniques that allowed him to determine the exact atomic weights of more than 30 elements, including oxygen, silver, chlorine, iodine, potassium, sodium and nitrogen.
This work was recognized with the 1914 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, due to traveling restrictions during World War I, Richards was unable to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. Besides this acknowledgment, he also received various honorary doctorates in science, medicine, philosophy, law and chemistry awarded by such universities as Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Princeton and Prague. Over the years he was president of the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Richards married Miriam Stuart Thayer in 1896, and they had two sons and a daughter. This notable chemist died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 2, 1928.
Robert Bárány (1876–1936)
1914 Physiology or Medicine
For his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus.
Robert Bárány was born in Vienna, Austria, and was the eldest of six children. His father managed an estate and his mother, the daughter of a well-known Prague scientist, led the intellectual life of the family. While still young, Bárány contracted tuberculosis of the bones, which led him to have difficulty moving a knee. He did not let this physical disability prevent him from enjoying an active and healthy lifestyle: two of his favorite activities were playing tennis and hiking in the Alps.
It may be that Bárány’s early illness inspired him to find cures for diseases, but, regardless, he finished his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1900. He then studied at the psychiatric-neurological clinic of Professor Kracpelin in Germany. It was there that his attention was first drawn to neurological problems. Over the years he worked with various doctors and, following different theories, was finally able to clarify the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus. It was for this important investigation that he was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The news surprised Bárány, who was in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at the time. He had been captured while serving in the Austrian army as a civilian surgeon treating wounded soldiers. While a prisoner of war, he was deprived of any type of literature, laboratory facilities or other scientific assistance.
Through the intervention of Prince Carl of Sweden and in the name of the Red Cross he was liberated in 1916. That same year he went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. After this, Bárány returned to Vienna but was disappointed with the attitude of his Austrian colleagues, who accused him of giving incomplete references to other scientists’ discoveries that had aided in his own. This tension in the scientific community finally led Bárány to accept an invitation to give lessons at the Otological Institute in Uppsala, where he remained until the end of his life.
Bárány married Ida Felicitas Berger in 1909, and the couple had two sons and a daughter. The eldest son became a professor of pharmacology at Uppsala University, the other an assistant professor of medicine at the Caroline Institute in Stockholm, while the daughter married a physician. In the last years of his life Bárány studied the causes of rheumatism and continued to work on a book about the subject even after he had suffered a stroke that left him nearly paralyzed. He died in 1936.
International Committee of the Red Cross
1917, 1944, 1963 Peace
The only Nobel Peace Prize to be attributed during World War I, for the help given to prisoners of war, by serving as an intermediary between them and the countries that captured them and for sending delegates to inspect the camps.
The Red Cross began when Henri Dunant, a Swiss citizen, noted that there existed no organized medical services to help the wounded during the bloody Battle of Solferino. In 1862 his Memory of Solferino was published and just one year later Dunant managed to attract enough support to establish the International Committee for Aid to the Wounded in Geneva.
In 1864, with the help of the Swiss government, a diplomatic conference was held. Representatives signed a convention with legally binding articles declaring that the medical corps, its assistants and the wounded themselves could not be considered as the enemy on the battlefield. So that they could be identified, an emblem was created that could be universally recognized as a sign of neutrality: a red cross on a white background.
The International Committee’s actions in times of war and peace have been recognized three times with a Nobel Peace Prize, more than any other organization. In 1917 and 1944 the award was given due to the work done during World War I and World War II. On the last occasion, in 1963, the prize was shared with the League of Red Cross Societies, now known as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which was founded in 1919.
The ICRC faced its first dramatic challenge during World War I. Immediately after the start of the conflict it established its Prisoners-of-War Agency, which was mostly staffed by international volunteers. By the end of the war the intervention of the agency was credited with the exchange of more than 200,000 prisoners between the warring parties, and by 1923 it had established a record system of more than 7 million prisoners or missing persons. This system aided in the identification of some 2 million prisoners of war and allowed communication to be established with their families. The International Committee of the Red Cross also distributed 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels and approximately 18 million Swiss francs in donations.
During World War II the ICRC carried out similar activities, although on a broader scale. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners of War contained information on 45 million prisoners and missing persons, delivered 120 million messages and organized relief efforts for civilian populations. After the world wars the ICRC continued to revise and expand its conventions, and in 1990 the United