Owned two sets of clothes and ran the world's largest volunteer ambulance service
A refugee who began with a single-room dispensary in Karachi in 1951 and a second-hand van. The Edhi Foundation now runs ambulances, orphanages,…
Found a baby at its dead mother's breast in the 1980 famine and went home with two orphans, then thousands
A child bride who ran away to Addis Ababa, she came back from a pilgrimage in 1980 with starving children, lost her marriage over it and sold her…
Gave up a brilliant academic career at 30 to start medicine and build a hospital in the African forest
A theologian and concert organist who trained as a doctor and in 1913 founded a hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon, where he worked for fifty years.…
Drove Santiago's streets at night in a green truck picking up the homeless, and died of cancer at 51
A fatherless boy from Viña del Mar who became a Jesuit and in 1944 founded the Hogar de Cristo shelters for people sleeping rough. He also founded a…
A priest who opened his door to migrants riding freight trains north through Mexico
A Mexican Catholic priest who founded a shelter for Central American migrants travelling north on freight trains, offering food, medical care and…
The Lagos doctor who refused to let an Ebola patient leave her hospital, and died of the disease
In July 2014 she diagnosed Ebola in a traveller from Liberia and, under pressure from officials, kept him in isolation in a city of twenty million.…
The consul who signed visas for days without stopping in June 1940 and lost everything for it
Portugal's consul-general in Bordeaux defied his own government to issue visas to thousands of refugees fleeing the German advance. Salazar stripped…
A rich young lawyer who fled from a leper in the rain, then gave his life to leprosy patients
Shamed by his own fear of a dying man, he trained in leprosy care, let doctors inject him with the bacteria, and in 1949 founded Anandwan, a…
Survived the abuse she later built a network of shelters to stop happening to others
Orphaned young and sexually abused as a child in Zimbabwe, she became a teacher and founded the Girl Child Network, building shelters and clubs that…
Made a career of the one job in India nobody wanted to talk about: toilets
An Indian sociologist who designed a cheap, safe toilet that freed hundreds of thousands of manual scavengers from cleaning human waste by hand, and…
A minister who went door to door in Notting Hill slums and founded Shelter
Shaken by the housing conditions he found in west London in the 1960s, he set up the Notting Hill Housing Trust in 1963 to buy and let decent homes,…
Trained illiterate grandmothers to become solar engineers in a village college with no exams
An Indian graduate who gave up a conventional career to live among labourers in rural Rajasthan, founding Barefoot College, which trains illiterate…
Taught herself to read jungle life so she could teach forest children to read at all
An Indonesian anthropologist who moved into the rainforest to live among the nomadic Orang Rimba people, building a system of portable, culturally…
Walked 100 laps of his garden at 99 and raised £38 million for the NHS
A retired army officer with a walking frame set out to raise £1,000 for NHS charities during the first Covid lockdown. Britain gave him 38,000 times…
Went to Ethiopia for three years in 1959 and stayed for the rest of her life, mending broken women
An Australian obstetrician who found women in Addis Ababa cast out because of childbirth injuries, developed the surgery to repair them and built the…
The businessman who ran Oxfam like a firm and opened the first charity shop
A London furniture trader who became honorary secretary of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942 and turned a wartime relief appeal into…
Buried a girl who killed herself at 14 and, twenty years later, put a phone in a crypt
An Anglican priest whose first service was the funeral of a teenager who believed her first period was a fatal disease. In 1953 he founded the…
A market vegetable seller in Taitung who gave away most of what she earned over fifty years
Left school at thirteen to run the family stall after her mother died in childbirth because they could not pay a hospital deposit. She lived on…
A Japanese diplomat who wrote visas by hand for weeks against orders, saving thousands of Jews
Vice-consul in Kaunas in 1940, he defied Tokyo three times and issued transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Poland, still writing them as his…
Nurse, social worker, then doctor at 38, she invented the modern hospice
Told that only a doctor could change how the dying were treated, she qualified in her late thirties, studied pain properly, and in 1967 opened St…
Named kwashiorkor, took on the milk companies and survived a Japanese prison camp
A Jamaican-born paediatrician in the Gold Coast who identified the childhood malnutrition disease kwashiorkor, attacked the marketing of condensed…
Carried supplies to the battlefields of the Civil War, then founded the American Red Cross
A shy schoolteacher and government clerk who drove wagons of bandages to the front lines of the American Civil War, traced 22,000 missing soldiers…
A retired foster mother in Harlem who took in babies born addicted to heroin, more than a thousand of them
Widowed young, she cleaned houses and fostered dozens of children. At 64 her daughter sent her a woman with a heroin-addicted baby, and within months…
Fled Burma through the jungle in 1988 and opened a clinic in a barn that now sees 100,000 patients a year
A young Karen doctor who escaped the crackdown on the 1988 uprising and set up a clinic for refugees on the Thai border in Mae Sot, sterilising…
