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.

He had worked after his training for the International Red Cross, but soon wanted to forge his own path. His charity Emergency, set up with his wife Teresa Sarti and about 20 friends in 1994, had equality of care as its first principle. So while its job was often to replace the Red Cross as it pulled back from combat zones, it also provided free centres of medical excellence in benighted and unexpected places. In Sudan he built a centre for heart surgery, one of the best in Africa, where he often worked himself. Paediatric centres were set up in the Central African Republic and in Uganda, where his friend Renzo Piano designed it...

The Economist. Obituary: Gino Strada believed health care was a human right