Gino Strada, Surgeon and EMERGENCY's Founder
Gino Strada was the founder, surgeon, Executive Director, the soul of EMERGENCY.
Sesto San Giovanni, 21 April 1948 – Honfleur, 13 August 2021
“Patients always come first.”
A sense of justice, lucidity, rigour, vision: these were the things that were immediately apparent in Gino. And if you got to know him better, you could see that he knew how to dream, have fun and invent one thousand things.
Gino Strada was born in Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, on 21 April 1948.
He graduated in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Milan and specialised in Emergency Surgery.
To complete his training as a medical surgeon, he spent four years in the United States in the 1980s, where he worked on heart and heart-lung transplant surgery at Stanford and Pittsburgh Universities. He then moved to England and South Africa, where he trained at Harefield Hospital and Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.
"What we do, we and others, what we can do with our own strength is perhaps less than a drop in the ocean. But I remain of the opinion that it is better that it is there, that drop, because if it were not there it would be worse for everyone. That is all. It's a tiring job, that of the war surgeon. But it is also, for me, a great honour."
Gino Strada
The Birth of EMERGENCY
In 1994, the experience gained over the years with the Red Cross led Gino Strada, together with his first wife Teresa Sarti and other colleagues and friends, to set up EMERGENCY, an organisation created to provide free, high-quality healthcare to victims of wars, landmines and poverty.
EMERGENCY’s first project, with Gino Strada on the frontline, was during the Rwandan genocide. Its second was in Cambodia, where Strada stayed for several years.
In 1998 he left for Afghanistan. He reached the north of the country by land, where, the following year, EMERGENCY opened its first facility in the country, a Surgical Centre for War Victims in Anabah, Panjshir Valley.
Gino Strada stayed in Afghanistan for seven years, treating thousands of war and landmine victims and contributing to the opening of other projects across the country.
In 2005, EMERGENCY began working to open the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Sudan, the first totally free heart surgery centre in Africa. In 2014, he went to Sierra Leone, where EMERGENCY has been present since 2001, during the Ebola epidemic.
Since founding EMERGENCY in 1994, the organisation has treated over 11 million people.
