Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gino Strada

2021; Elsevier BV; Volume: 398; Issue: 10309 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(21)02218-2

1474-547X

Geoff Watts,

Health and Conflict Studies

Surgeon and founder of the non-governmental organisation Emergency. He was born in Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, on April 21, 1948, and died of heart disease in Honfleur, France, on Aug 3, 2021, aged 73 years. The medical and humanitarian charity Emergency has provided free health care to more than 11 million people in 19 different countries, including in locations affected by conflict such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. Luigi (Gino) Strada, the Italian surgeon who founded Emergency in 1994, came to view the provision of emergency medical care as one strand of an even more demanding goal. Speaking in Seoul, South Korea, after the award of the 2017 Sunhak Peace Prize, he summarised his aim: “If we wish to work for the survival of human kind, the abolition of war is necessary and inevitable.” This ambition shaped Strada's outlook in a long career providing emergency medical relief. In 2007, he succeeded in opening one of Africa's first free hospitals for heart surgery. The Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Sudan has since provided care for more than 80 000 patients and undertaken some 10 000 operations. When he later decided to build a children's surgical hospital in Uganda, Strada contacted Renzo Piano, the celebrated Italian architect whose buildings include the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Shard in London. Piano agreed to take on the task. Simonetta Gola, Head of Media Relations at Emergency and also Strada's wife, cannot recall him ever describing something as impossible. “He had a kind of motto. ‘If you want to do something, just do it’, he used to say. If you start to do something and you really can't do it, only then can you say it is impossible.” Strada's move into the kind of medicine that came to dominate his life was first motivated simply by a desire for professional development. He had studied medicine at the University of Milan and stayed on to begin training in surgery until 1978, when he moved to a hospital at Rho on the outskirts of the city. During the 1980s he worked in heart–lung transplantation, and acquired international experience at Stanford and Pittsburgh universities in the USA, at South Africa's Groote Schuur Hospital, and in the UK at Harefield Hospital. “He was passionate about surgery”, says Gola, “and he wanted to find out how it could be practised in a low-resource country…he wanted a different experience.” Starting in 1989, Strada spent 5 years working as a surgeon with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other conflict zones. Strada, with his first wife Teresa Sarti and a group of close friends, formed Emergency in 1994. One of them, Ennio Rigamonti, explains that it was born out of a fusion of idealism and the desire to solve practical problems. “Like Gino, I believe that medical cures are the right of every human being”, he says. “Gino held this idea very strongly.” One of their first forays was into Rwanda, dealing with the consequences of the genocide. Emergency also set up a hospital in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley, followed by others in Kabul and Lashkar Gah. Strada himself spent long periods in these facilities as a hands-on surgeon. It was after a stint in Kabul that he realised just how many of his patients were civilian victims of war—and this set the tone for Emergency's future development. “He started to think about war”, says Gola, “and this led to his commitment against it”. Strada aimed to work unconditionally, without reference to politics and without taking sides. Piano first met Strada 10 years ago, and felt an immediate affinity, which was why he readily agreed to Strada's request. “Gino said to me, ‘I want you to design for me a hospital in Uganda…I want a beautiful hospital.’” What caught Piano's imagination was the word beautiful. It resonated with his own thinking. “When you make a gift it has to be the best possible gift”, he says. A hospital, Piano argues, should be a place not only of medical excellence but of human excellence. As Gola confirms, Strada too thought like this. “He wanted the best environment for the best work for the best treatment for patients”, she says. As Rigamonti explains, “Gino was very imaginative…When he had a big idea he was able to get people's attention. He was able to make the idea credible.” Strada was rigorous in his work adds Gola, “but at home, always a cheerful man.” In addition to his wife Simonetta, Strada leaves a daughter Cecilia by his first marriage to Teresa.