Johan Hendrik Christiaan Basting

Youth, early career, and marriage

Basting was born in Enkhuizen on 20 September 1817, the son of hospital master Dingeman Cornelis Basting and Frederika Sophia Wilhelmina Schneider. He was 17 years old when he was admitted as a student at the National Institute for Military Medicine in Utrecht. In 1839 he became army physician Class 3. In 1844 Basting was placed in Breda, where he became Officer of Health Class 2. After a short interim period in Maastricht, he was transferred to Gorinchem. In 1853 he was promoted to Officer of Health Class 1 and transferred to Leiden. The following year he married in Gorinchem with Amalie Fréderique Kattenbusch, born in Eschweiler. He received his PhD in Leiden on 12 March 1855. In the same year he was transferred from Leiden to the Regiment Grenadiers and Jagers in The Hague where he would stay until 1870, with a short break due to an interim transfer to Bergen op Zoom

Basting's Réveil background

Basting, his Swiss friend Dunant, and the first Red Cross volunteer who - together with another Swiss (Dr. Louis Appia, with Dunant and three other Swiss co-founder of the ICRC) - was sent to a war front, the Dutchman (and painter / writer) Charles William Meredith van de Velde, were all born in a Calvinistic Réveil environment. The Réveil movement originated in Geneva at the beginning of the 19th century in response to The Enlightenment. All three had from childhood learned to take care of others, for example Dunant visited with his parents prisoners, and they helped poor in their community. Basting and his wife Amalie have translated a number of writings from the Geneva Réveil theologian and philosopher Jules-Ernest Naville from French into Dutch. And Dunant organized meetings for fellow believers in Geneva. Van de Velde has visited one or more such meetings in Geneva, Basting has likely never been in Geneva. It was this international network of Dunant that brought him in contact with Johan Basting in 1862. Dunant was a critic of institutionalized church and was an agnost.