| Dr. Gustav Rau
The only child of a wealthy German industrialist, Gustav Rau was born in 1922 in Stuttgart. At the age of forty, he decided to return to school to become a doctor while continuing to run the family business. Soon after graduating with a medical degree from Munich University in 1969, he sold the factories he inherited from his father and uncle to set up the Fondation Médicale du Docteur Rau. The foundation’s purpose was to diminish misery and disease in Third World countries through preventative practices and the distribution of medication. |
|
Dr. Rau’s specialty was pediatrics. He worked initially in Nigeria, then in Zaire. In 1977, he built a hospital in a remote village near Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Unmarried and childless, Rau said, “The hospital is my family.” With the largest pediatric unit in the area, his hospital cared for nearly 2,000 patients per year and distributed food to more than 8,000 people a day. In 1992, complications from surgery along with the outbreak of a civil war in Rwanda prevented the 70-year-old doctor from continuing his work. Today, the hospital continues to function with Congolese doctors and the occasional help of Belgian doctors. Gustav Rau died in 2002 near the city of Stuttgart where he was born. |
|||
