Louis Schittly was born in 1938, in a peasant family of a small village of Sundgau, in Bernwiller, in Alsace. He was destined to take over the family farm, but the war stories that rocked his childhood change his dreams. Having become a doctor, he went to see wars up close: Biafra, Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Sudan. In 1969 at the Santana hospital in Biafra, he fought against the famine which was ravaging children. He and his friends will be nicknamed the Frenchs Doctors; they create Médecins Sans Frontières with Bernard Kouchner.