Hygienic dungeon

In May 1906 Archduke Franz Salvator opened a large international hygiene exhibition in Vienna. In early July the first major revision to the Hague Convention was adopted in Geneva, among other things strengthening the protections for prisoners of war. The International Committee of the Red Cross was especially prominent in pressing for these provisions, surely strengthening the modern conviction that enforced confinement should be sanitary. In this image we see a “hygienic dungeon cell from the year 1950,” as imagined in Viennese satirical magazine Der Floh in June 1906. Note how all the accoutrements come with the Red Cross symbol.