Memorial Dr. Antoine Depage

Antoine Depage was a Belgian surgeon and professor who, at the beginning of the 20th century, played an important role both nationally and internationally in the development of medicine and in the treatment of war victims in particular.

A few weeks after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912, Dr. Depage for the Belgian Red Cross four field hospitals in Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia.
He himself and his wife cared for the wounded in Constantinople. On the basis of these experiences, in April 1914, he opened the Fourth Congress of the International Surgical Association, of which he presided. He set out the basic ideas that would guide him in reforming the care of war victims in the First World War.

At the request of Queen Elisabeth, Dr. Depage organized a hospital in the Royal Palace in Brussels at the start of the war in August 1914. In order to also organize victim support behind the front, he then traveled via the Netherlands to Calais, where in November 1914 he set up a hospital in the Jeanne d'Arc Institute.
When the front ran aground on the Yser, in December 1914, Depage transformed the Hotel L'Océan behind the front in De Panne into a military hospital managed by the Red Cross. In England he found support and material and in a short time 200 beds were available, but in the following years this became more than 1000.
The hospital was organized into different wings where patients were classified according to injuries. In addition, a research center had also been added and mobile surgical units were organized a few kilometers from the front line to attend to urgent injuries.

During the war years, Depage himself was confronted with two personal tragedies.
In 1915, Marie Depage left for the United States to collect money and resources for the hospital. She decided to return with the Lusitania and died on May 5 when this ship was torpedoed. Her death caused a lot of commotion in the United States.
In October of the same year, his co-worker Edith Cavell was shot by the Germans, which caused a lot of commotion in Great Britain.

Source : Wikipedia

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• Text: Marie-Christine Vinck
• Photos: Marie-Christine Vinck