The Congolese surgeon who has repaired tens of thousands of women brutalised by war
A gynaecologist whose first hospital was destroyed in war, he founded Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in 1999 and became the world's leading expert in…
Built the hospital his own mother could not reach in time, and kept building more
A Congolese basketball star who, grieving a mother who died for lack of medical care, spent much of his NBA fortune building a modern hospital in…
Found the mentally ill chained in unheated cells and shamed legislatures into building hospitals
A schoolteacher broken by ill health who, at 39, visited a jail and found insane women locked in the cold. She spent the next forty years documenting…
A dog breeder in Switzerland who answered a blind man's letter and started the guide dog movement
A wealthy widow breeding German shepherds in Switzerland, she wrote a magazine article about dogs guiding blinded veterans in Germany, trained a dog…
An American nun shot dead defending Amazon farmers from the loggers she confronted
A Catholic nun from Ohio who spent nearly four decades helping poor settlers farm sustainably in the Brazilian Amazon, resisting illegal loggers and…
A civil servant who watched his father die of cancer and spent his salary founding a charity to help others
In 1911, grieving his father, a Somerset-born clerk in the Board of Agriculture founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer from his…
A nurse who helped 200 soldiers escape occupied Belgium and was shot for it
Matron of a Brussels nursing school, she hid Allied soldiers and guided them to neutral Holland. Arrested and court-martialled, she was executed at…
Sold her car, spent her pension and built a maternity hospital on a rubbish tip in Hargeisa
Somaliland's first trained nurse-midwife, a former first lady and WHO official, retired and put everything she had into a hospital in Hargeisa that…
A slum kid from Cavite who pushed a classroom on a cart to children the gangs were recruiting
Bullied by gang members as a boy, he and his friends founded the Dynamic Teen Company at sixteen, then loaded blackboards and books onto pushcarts…
Arrested for handing out leaflets about starving enemy children, she founded Save the Children
A failed schoolteacher with poor health who insisted after the First World War that hungry German and Austrian children were still children. She…
Walked into Newgate's women's wards in 1813 and made Parliament look at what she saw
A Quaker mother of eleven who found women and children packed into filthy, violent prison wards, she organised schools and work inside, gave evidence…
A self-taught bush nurse who defied the doctors on polio and was proved right
With no formal qualifications she treated polio in the Australian outback with hot packs and movement instead of splints. Ridiculed at home, she was…
Told to go home and sit still in 1914, she took women's hospitals to France, Serbia and Russia
An Edinburgh doctor who offered the War Office fully staffed women's medical units and was dismissed. She sent them to the Allies instead: fourteen…
Ran the only working hospital in a war zone for two decades, alone when he had to
A South Sudanese surgeon who left a stable job in Egypt to treat the wounded of Sudan's civil wars, rebuilding his hospital each time it was bombed…
Volunteered for the leprosy settlement on Molokai and died there of the disease
A Belgian farm boy turned priest who went in 1873 to the leprosy colony at Kalaupapa in Hawaii, where he built houses and coffins, dressed wounds and…
Founder of modern nursing and a pioneer of using data to save lives
She defied her wealthy family to become a nurse, cut the death rate in the Crimean War hospitals, and then used statistics to force reform of the…
Gruff eye surgeon who took cataract surgery to Aboriginal Australia, Eritrea and Nepal
A New Zealand-born ophthalmologist who spent years in Aboriginal communities restoring sight, then set up factories in Eritrea and Nepal to make…
A transplant surgeon who spent thirty years in war zones and built a free heart hospital in Sudan
An Italian surgeon who left transplant medicine to operate on the wounded of Afghanistan, Rwanda and Iraq, founded the charity Emergency in 1994 and…
A London parlourmaid rejected by the missions who led a hundred children across the mountains of China
Failed by the mission society, she saved her wages and crossed Siberia alone to reach a remote Chinese town, where she ran an inn, freed girls' feet…
Retired at 58 with crippled hands and built an eye hospital that treats the poor for nothing
Rheumatoid arthritis ended his career as an obstetrician, so he learned to hold a cataract knife with deformed fingers. In 1976 he opened an…
Turned her own country's war into a landmark UN report on children under fire
A former guerrilla fighter and Mozambique's first education minister, she wrote the 1996 UN study that first measured the toll of war on children,…
Rowed out with her father into a storm at 22, saved nine people and hated the fame that followed
A lighthouse keeper's daughter on the Farne Islands who spotted survivors of the wrecked steamer Forfarshire in September 1838 and helped her father…
Turned her family farm into a refuge for 90,000 people through Somalia's civil war
One of Somalia's first female gynaecologists, she opened a one-room clinic on her land in 1983. When the state collapsed it became a camp, hospital…
Went to Belsen at 20, and sixty years later was still sitting with survivors of torture
A young Jewish Londoner who volunteered for the liberated camps in 1945, she spent the rest of her life with the damaged, founding the Medical…
