The smiling doctor

Luisa Guidotti Mistrali was born in Parma on 17 May 1932. Her mother was a baroness and her father was a state official. While still a child, she lost her mother and with her family she moved to live with an aunt in Modena. Educated in a Christian way, the girl was fascinated by the Female Medical-Missionary Association founded by Adele Pignatelli. She therefore enrolled in medicine against the advice of her father who wanted her to be a mathematics teacher: "on a mission it is more useful to be a doctor". She leaves for Africa as soon as possible, heading to Chirundu hospital, in Zambia, and then moving to Harare Central Hospital, in Zimbabwe.

she finds her definitive "homeland" at the Jesuits' All Souls Mission. «The hospital is all there: two sheds and six huts; dilapidated walls, thatched roofs." In 40 years of work, in 1971, the hospital welcomed 5,600 patients. Father David Gibs, chaplain of All Souls, writes: "This was my first and most vivid impression of her: a profoundly alive and happy woman, always smiling, in love with her people and her missionary work." Meanwhile the country is torn apart by civil war, Luisa is arrested for having treated the wounded rebels, she is then released, but the situation remains very serious, to the point that in the years to come even Italy asks her to leave the country.

Luisa refuses. The government continues to be hostile to her, and the circumstances of her death seem to confirm her worst suspicions. On 6 July 1979, while she was accompanying a woman giving birth in her Land-Rover on her way to Nyadiri hospital, she was hit with four revolver shots fired by two soldiers at checkpoints. She had chosen to go alone: «We are at war! Better if only I die and the nurses can continue to help the sick. I don't know if I'll come back, take care of the hospital." At her funeral, a tombstone sent by the Italian government will be unveiled: no one has a greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends (Jn 15.13).


Annamaria Gobbato
NP June / July 2023