Médecins Du Monde

About Us

A boat is adrift. On board are 2,564 Vietnamese refugees whom no country will accept. Desperate, they raise a banner: “We are threatened with famine and epidemics. United Nations, save us!” Doctors, including Bernard Kouchner, intellectuals, and journalists set off on a hospital ship, L’Île de Lumière, to treat and bear witness to the plight of the boat people.

On May 21, 1980, Médecins du Monde was born. The organization set itself a threefold goal: to go where others do not, to bear witness to the intolerable, and to work on a voluntary basis. According to one of the founding physicians, the goal was above all to “create a structure ready to respond to emergency situations as quickly as possible, something that international institutions sometimes cannot do.”