Witness History23 Sep 2025

The birth of Médecins Sans Frontières

In 1971, 13 men sat down in a Paris office to launch what would become one of the world’s best known humanitarian organisations: Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors without Borders.

The men were among hundreds of volunteers responding to an appeal by the French medical journal, Tonus, after a major cyclone devastated East Pakistan.

The campaign sparked the idea for the charity. The 13 founders – two journalists and 11 doctors – drew up a charter aiming to provide medical care regardless of race, religion or politics.

MSF’s first missions included helping victims of a Nicaraguan earthquake and a hurricane in Honduras. And in 1999, the charity won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their work.

Dr Xavier Emmanuelli, one of the founders, talks to Jane Wilkinson about setting up MSF, and his early humanitarian work.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.

(Photo: Doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières in Chad, 1981. Credit: Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images)

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(2000)

Washoe: The chimp who learnt to sign

In 1970, Washoe the chimpanzee was widely recognised as the first non-human to learn a human language. She was taught American sign language in a revolutionary experiment led by psychology professor...

14 Okt 10min

Harry Harlow's monkey attachment studies

In the late 1950s, psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments on baby rhesus monkeys which would become some of the most controversial in modern science.Using wire models as surrogate...

13 Okt 10min

The first monkeys to survive space travel

On 28 May 1959, the USA sent two monkeys, Able and Baker, into space.They were the first living creatures to survive a space flight.It was a watershed moment for the American space agency NASA and its...

12 Okt 10min

The most successful Paralympian in history

Trischa Zorn-Hudson is the most decorated Paralympian in history.Competing across seven games, Trischa - who has been blind since birth - won a remarkable haul of 55 medals.In that time, she also saw ...

10 Okt 9min

The boy behind the creation of the Winnie-the-Pooh books

When the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published in 1926, few could have imagined that the stories of a honey-loving bear would capture the hearts of readers across the world. Author A.A. Milne based...

9 Okt 10min

How rats were trained to clear landmines

In 2004, the world's first team of mine-detecting rats passed accreditation tests, opening the way for them to be used in humanitarian demining operations. The project was the brainchild of Belgian re...

8 Okt 10min

The mirrors that lit up a dark Norwegian town

In October 2013, people in the small Norwegian town of Rjukan experienced winter sunshine for the first time in history.This was thanks to the arrival of an unusual invention - giant mirrors high up o...

7 Okt 9min

Egypt’s President Sadat is assassinated

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, two years later he was assassinated. The president was killed at a military parade by a group of army officers, in ...

6 Okt 10min