For 50 years, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has brought medical care to the victims of earthquakes, famines, epidemics, conflicts and other disasters. It grew out of the ideals of a group of newly qualified French doctors who wanted to be on the ground helping those most in need anywhere in the world, reports FRANCE 24.
Today, from helping those displaced by Yemen's civil war, to fighting the Ebola virus in Africa and saving migrants in the Mediterranean, the organisation has about 100 operations in nearly 75 countries.
But its evolution from being the dream of a dedicated few with little or no resources, to becoming globally recognised for its humanitarian work -- winning a Nobel Peace Prize along the way -- has not been without controversy or acrimony.
"From a dream, we created an epic story," Xavier Emmanuelli, 83, a co-founder of MSF, told AFP proudly.
"We wanted to go wherever people are suffering. Today that may seem trite, at the time it was revolutionary," said another of its founders, Bernard Kouchner.
The dream, however, began from a nightmare.
In 1968, the Biafra war was raging between secessionists in southeastern Nigeria and government troops.
Civilians were being killed by bombs and famine, due to a blockade by authorities.
In Paris, where in May that year students and unions took to the streets in revolt, several doctors just out of university responded to an appeal by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Arriving in Nigeria, they were to witness the horror and chaos for themselves.
"We weren't prepared," Kouchner, who was one of them and is now aged 81, told AFP.
"The children were dying en masse because the army was blocking all supplies. It was clear to us young doctors that speaking out against this situation was our duty as medics."
Flying in the face of the ICRC's policy of silence, the doctors decided to expose the realities of the Biafra conflict through the media.
In providing care -- but also bearing witness -- the move gave rise to the modern concept of humanitarian aid.
MSF was founded in December 1971, its name chosen during an evening of smoking and drinking, Emmanuelli recalled.
The early days were difficult. Without funding, the nascent organisation effectively served as a source of doctors for hire by other NGOs.
Although a publicity campaign in 1977 made the NGO's name more widely known in France, initial missions often turned into harrowing ordeals.
When, as a young doctor Claude Malhuret set off for Thailand in 1975, full of enthusiasm for the task at hand of helping victims who had fled Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, he was soon disillusioned.
"It was terrible. We had nothing, you had to get by for everything," the 71-year-old centre-right member of France's parliamentary upper house told AFP in an interview at his office.
That applied to finding equipment, setting up the camp and even having medicines and food, he said.
The experience shook everyone up, he added, and made it clear they could not go on just cobbling things together.
For a while by now, those running MSF bitterly disagreed about its future path.
On one side were those who wanted to keep it a small group of friends operating in "commando" mode; on the other, newer members were bent on expansion.
The situation came to a head in 1979 over Vietnam when Kouchner, then MSF president, mobilised Paris intellectuals including philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to charter a boat to pick up refugees fleeing the communist regime.
That style of activism annoyed rivals within the organisation who voted down the move, leading to some members including Kouchner leaving the NGO.
He went on to set up the campaigning medical organisation, Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World).
But the wounds of that episode still sting four decades later.
"A sad power struggle," Kouchner, who was France's foreign minister between 2007 and 2010, said of the incident.
"I was very angry at them."
But for Emmanuelli, an ex-state secretary for humanitarian action, Kouchner's courting of the media was not the way forward.
"MSF Kouchner-style had become waffle," he said.