Obituary: Gino Strada believed health care was a human right

PEOPLE OFTEN wondered why Gino Strada led the life he did. With his skills as a heart-and-lung surgeon, trained not only in his native Milan but at Stanford and Groote Schuur, in South Africa, he could have settled in a pleasant villa somewhere beyond the city, working at an easy pace and growing the roses he loved. Instead he seemed to live in operating theatres in desperate places, draining, cleaning, cutting and suturing the worst wounds imaginable. They were vast wounds, the result of landmines and bomb blasts that tore bodies to rags. Between patients he would stand outside in his bloodied scrubs, a raddled-looking man with a messy beard, chain-smoking.

The worst of it was that his patients were rarely combatants. If they had been he would have treated them all alike, as human beings whose faith or affiliation made no difference to him. But wherever he worked, in Iraq, Pakistan, Rwanda, Yemen and especially Afghanistan, where he spent seven years, the war-wounded were almost all civilians. They were women fetching water, farmers digging, shoppers in the market. What had they to do with war? Almost half the injured, quite young enough to cry and yet stoically not crying, were children. In Afghanistan many had picked up one of the little “green parrots”, dropped from Soviet helicopters, strange pretty things, which then burst in...