Gino Strada

Gino Strada trained in Milan as a heart and lung transplant surgeon and spent time in the United States and South Africa learning the field. In his late thirties he began working for the International Committee of the Red Cross as a war surgeon, and found that most of the patients he operated on in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, Somalia and Bosnia were civilians, and most of those were children hit by landmines and shells.

He came home convinced that the humanitarian world had lowered its standards for the poor. In 1994 he and his wife Teresa Sarti founded Emergency, a charity whose principle was that a hospital in a war zone should be as clean and well-equipped as one in Milan, and completely free. Its first hospital opened in Rwanda that year. Others followed in Kabul, Lashkar Gah and the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Sierra Leone during Ebola, and on a rescue ship in the Mediterranean.

His most ambitious project was the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, opened in 2007, which offered open-heart surgery free to patients from across Africa. Critics called it an extravagance; Strada called it a right.

He was a heavy-smoking, blunt pacifist who denounced all wars, including those fought in the name of humanitarian intervention, and refused to distinguish between his patients' politics. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 2015. He died of heart failure in Normandy in 2021, aged 73.