The traumatologist and surgeon Flavio Del Ponte, born in 1944, takes stock after 40 years of working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the WHO and the UN – and takes us on a journey around the world that has perhaps not gotten any worse, but neither has it gotten any better. At the age of 32, he moved from Italian-speaking Switzerland to Central Africa, where he took over the management of a provincial hospital in Gabon. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of the doctor and philosopher Albert Schweitzer, who once founded this “jungle hospital” and received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. It is just the first of numerous positions in which Del Ponte alleviated human suffering, built structures and trained colleagues.
