The Colored Cross

Because green represents vibrant health while red represents active danger.

"Fixed a Geneva Convention violation (by replacing red crosses in graphics)."

— Patch 1.3.32 notes, Stardew Valley

In real life, whenever you see medical paraphernalia such as first aid kits, ambulances, or nurse caps, your attention will often be drawn to the Red Cross symbol (or the Red Crescent in Muslim countries) to know that it's medicine. But in fiction, while it's a subtle detail, you'll mostly find crosses resembling plus signs in colors other than red, because the last thing the fiction writers and game developers want is a war crime violation from the Geneva Convention.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement makes it Serious Business to protect the symbol when it comes to medical service and humanitarian aid. Even the aforementioned Red Crescent and the religiously neutral Red Crystal symbol are off-limits. This isn't due to them being jerks or trying to preserve trademarks for money. Instead, it is to prevent war crimes. The Red Cross, Crescent, and Crystal symbols are specifically noted in the Geneva Conventions as a protective symbol. In its purest sense, it is only supposed to be used in wartime, to clearly denote people^note such as medics, places^note hospitals and aid stations and things^note ambulances, medical supplies that it is a war crime to attack. The fear is that if it is diluted into a generic medical symbol, that the protective meaning will be lost, inviting war crimes. A secondary issue is to prevent quackery, as the Red Cross symbol is associated with the ICRC, as well as Johnson and Johnson in the United States. How is it that Johnson and Johnson is allowed to use the symbol? They were grandfathered in as their use of the symbol predates the Geneva Conventions that codified the proper use of the symbol. Johnson and Johnson's rights to use the symbol were upheld in court as recently as 2008.

As such, other symbols like the Staff of Asclepius, the similar Caduceus^note though, its association with medicine is down to a mistake by the US Army, who mistook it for the similar-looking Rod of Asclepius when creating the branch symbol for the Medical Corps, and then just collectively said "Sure, Why Not?" when the error was pointed out. The Caduceus is historically associated with Hermes and was a sign for messengers., the Star of Life, or the aforementioned color substitutes are used. Green^note although this is in some places increasingly being associated with medicinal marijuana dispensaries or blue^note a bit rarer, as a blue cross is the trademark of Blue Cross health insurance, or even cyan are often used due to being colors of health and sanitation. Other variants are a white cross on a green background for first aid, or even a white cross with a red background^note This one is also iffy, as it is the flag of Switzerland. In fact, the inversion of the Swiss flag was the genesis for the Red Cross symbol.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Many a Nurse Joy and their occasional Chansey assistants in Pokémon: The Series will have a variety of colored crosses or Pokeball symbols in their caps, although in earlier episodes, they would have the standard red crosses.

Asian Animation

• In Happy Heroes, Sweet S. has a pink cross on her outfit to show she's the nurse of the team. Its pink color is more obvious in the Season 10 Art Shift, which lightened it.

Music

• After a request from the American Red Cross, the subsequent releases of the blink-182 album Enema of the State removed the red cross from the hat of Janine Lindemulder's Naughty Nurse Outfit on the album's packaging. For the cover of the Live Album The Mark, Tom and Travis Show (which was released a year later), the drawn nurse based on Lindemulder has a hat with a red heart.

Toys

• Transformers: In the original toyline, comic book and cartoon, the Red Cross symbol was used on ambulance-mode Transformers like Ratchet and Red Alert. Ratchet in particular had two such symbols on his shoulders in robot mode. However, since the '80s, Hasbro has opted to use all sorts of workarounds instead due to this trope. For example, both the animated and live-action film incarnations of Ratchet instead have circles with zigzag lines invoking a heartbeat monitor screen. Even modern toys of the original G1 Ratchet (e.g. in the high-end Masterpiece line, 2016's Combiner Wars and 2022's Studio Series) no longer use the cross: one version had the cross shifted to instead become an X while another added diamonds at the end of each cross arm, but now the consistent one is having the Autobot emblem at the center of the cross.

Video Games

• 60 Seconds!: In the game's initial release, the Medkit was white with a red cross. For unexplained (but presumably obvious) reasons, an eventual update changed the cross's color to green.
• Among Us: The game developers over at Innersloth confirmed that they changed the colors of the crosses on the MedBays to blue in order to avoid a Geneva Convention violation.
• In the initial release of Cute Bite the Nurse characters had little red crosses on their hats; this was removed in an update to leave them pure white.
• The 2024 Remaster of Dark Forces modifies the sprites for Medkits to have blue crosses on them after using red ones in the original game.
• The Medkits from Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour were changed from red crosses to red-and-white pills.
• Doom has a red cross on the stimpacks, medikits, and berserk power-up in their original releases and earlier console ports. In the 2012 Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and BFG Edition re-releases, the red cross was replaced with a red-and-white pill. In the 2019 Unity ports, the red cross was recolored to green.
• EarthBound removed all the red cross logos that were on hospital buildings in the original Japanese version.
• Subverted in Eternal Darkness in Peter's chapter: The hospital tents are marked with the Red Cross.
• Fallout:
  • Averted in Fallout and 2 (which use the same models) where "First Aid Kits" are white boxes with red trim and a clear red cross in the center.
  • Played straight in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas which have a black cross in the center of a white box for their First Aid Kits. Fallout 4 changes these to a green cross.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • From II until Vice City Stories, first aid kits were portrayed as red hearts that are occasionally placed within a circle. One exception is the Advance version where the kits are barely visible red crosses.
  • The First Aid kits found in IV and V are green with a white cross on the side.
• Averted in Grim Dawn. There's are red crosses on the Apothecary item set, specifically on the gauntlets.
• Health packs in Halo originally featured a prominent red cross◊, but starting from Halo: Reach they instead have a prominent red H◊.
• Subverted in Left 4 Dead and its sequel, as the first aid kits in both clearly feature a red cross on a white background, and the first aid station features two on its labeling.
• In LEGO The Lord of the Rings, after Frodo gets stabbed with a Morgul blade, Merry and Pippin are suddenly carrying a stretcher, wearing surgical masks, and carrying cases with red crosses on them, all for Rule of Funny.
• Mass Effect: Medigel stations feature a red cross with an angled cutout in the middle, giving the impression of a red cube next to a red sideways T. Cutting it real close there, Bioware.
• Mega Man X: Command Mission: Cinnamon's hat prominently displays the red cross with a blue border in the original game, but in her later appearances the cross has been changed to be fully blue and borderless.
• Neverwinter Nights used to have red crosses on healing kits until the Red Cross filed a complain against Bioware. They were then removed on later patches.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 has blue crosses for all the various healing spells icons.
• Pizza Tower: Gustavo’s Technical Difficulty screen when falling into a Bottomless Pit originally showed him caring for Brick using a medkit with a red cross. It was changed to a green cross in an update to avoid getting copyright struck.
• Quake has a red cross on the medikit for the first two games in the series. The third game has green and yellow crosses floating in orbs, and the fourth game changed to a white symbol on a red background. The first two game's remasters change the red crosses to red squares and green crosses, respectively.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: While the original run of the game used a red cross for its first aid building, one of the few changes made for Complete Edition was to recolor said cross to green.
• Skullgirls: Valentine, the game's resident Deadly Doctor and Hospital Hottie, previously had red crosses in her character design. For legal reasons, these were later recolored magenta, then eventually replaced with a shuriken-like shape.
• Sonic Chronicles: One of the game's healing items is a first aid kit with a cyan cross.
• Stardew Valley: Since version 1.3.32, the cross signs outside and inside Harvey's clinic are recolored from red to cyan/green or grey; the patch notes explains the change as "Fixed a Geneva Convention violation (by replacing red crosses in graphics)."
• Subverted with Team Fortress 2's Medic. The BLU Medic has blue crosses on his coat and backpack...but only because he's a member of BLU team, not for legal reasons, and thus the RED Medic has red crosses.
• In Toontown Online, both the Ambulance Chaser Cog and the Nurse Shark fish wore hats with red crosses on them to fit their respective medical themes. The two most popular fan servers made after the game's closure work around this in different ways: Toontown Rewritten replaces the Ambulance Chaser's cross with a gear resembling the Star of Life and the Nurse Shark's cross with an anchor (both still being red), while Toontown: Corporate Clash simply changes the color of the crosses (dark purple for the Ambulance Chaser and light blue for the Nurse Shark).
• Modern reissues of Wolfenstein 3-D replace the first-aid crosses with hearts. The manual for the original release stated that the first-aid kits were intercepted Red Cross packages.
• In World of Warcraft, the symbol for healers is a golden cross on a green background.

Webcomics

• The Transformers example of medic Ratchet's original design having red crosses on his shoulders is parodied in Lil Formers which has Ratchet offering a compromise by saying he'll simply tilt his shoulders and the crosses will look like a pair of red exes.

Web Original

• Neopets: The hospital's main logo is a green cross, and some of the medications have green crosses on the labels.

Western Animation

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The medical pony Nurse Redheart initially had a cutie mark^note the symbol on a pony's haunch that represents their special talent of a red cross surrounded by four pink hearts, and also had the same symbol on her uniform hat. In season 7 of the show (and slightly before that in official merchandise), Redheart's symbol changed to a white cross with a red outline, surrounded by four red hearts and with one red heart in the center. There hasn't been any official statement on the change, so it's unknown if the International Red Cross sent a cease-and-desist notice or if Hasbro realized the mistake on their own and preemptively changed it.
  • Other nurse ponies from the show had white cross cutie marks from the beginning (or in the case of Nurse Tenderheart, a red cross on a blue-gray field rather than a white one) so they never needed to be changed.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The medical sigil introduced in this series (and used in subsequent Star Wars works) looks similar to a red cross, but is very stylized, asymmetrical, has a few other geometries added, and put inside a red circle to make it both legal and look like something unique to that universe.
• Transformers: Animated: Ratchet the ambulance has, in place of a cross, a red circle with a white zigzag line representing a heartbeat monitor.

Real Life

• Works made in Japan often use a green cross, because in that country the green cross is the symbol for workplace health and safety.
• Instead of using a red cross, pharmacies in many countries use alternate symbols:
  • In the United States, an RX symbol (sometimes combined with a mortar and pestle) is used.
  • In Germany, a red Gothic-script capital letter A (for "Apotheke") is used.
  • A serpent around a palm tree is used in Portugal.
  • France uses neon-illuminated green crosses to signal pharmacies, with sometimes a caduceus nearby.
  • Britain uses a green cross for pharmacies, but has only done so since 1984; the mortar and pestle is still in common use in Scotland.
  • In Austria and Hungary, a bowl of Hygeia with the serpent of Epidaurus is used; In Austria, the serpent and bowl are shaped like a cursive capital A.
• In the Soviet Union the Red Cross has always been used as a generic medical symbol, effectively grandfathering this practice for USSR's successor states. It wouldn't be very Communist to obey whims of bourgeoisie, right? In the post-Soviet countries, the Red Cross is still used on ambulances and medical facilities to this day.
• The red cross emblem on Johnson & Johnson products actually predates the use of the symbol by The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. They're allowed to use it via Grandfather Clause.
• Pre-1973, ambulances in the United States often bore a traffic-safety-orange cross, in what the operators thought would be an acceptable compromise. The ICRC thought differently and successfully had the practice stopped. In its place came the Star of Life, the blue 6-armed asterisk and Rod of Asclepius symbol used today for EMT and ambulance services.

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