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.