Lucille Teasdale. Deborah Cowley

and this is a big year for women!” Lucille laughed.

      Lucille was a keen and bright student. She was also strikingly attractive, tall and slender with wavy blonde hair and big brown eyes. In spite of her inferiority complex – she always thought others were better and brighter than she was – she was popular with her first year classmates, who elected her Miss Medicine. Others too noticed this bright young student: when the Quebec publication Le Petit Journal was looking for a university student to feature on its cover for the October 1951 edition, they chose a photo of the budding doctor Lucille Teasdale giving an injection to a rabbit!

      In 1955, Lucille graduated from medical school cum laude. She had decided to specialize in surgery and began her internship at Ste-Justine’s children’s hospital in Montreal. She was the only woman in her class to choose surgery. She thought women were made for surgery, that it was women’s work – like sewing.

      Few were convinced. All her friends tried to discourage her from choosing surgery. “Surgery is a man’s world,” one of them told her. Another took her aside and gave her an even stronger warning: “No mother would ever put her child’s life in the hands of a woman surgeon,” she said.

      Lucille was determined to silence the sceptics. She would show her male colleagues that she was as good as they were. So she worked twice as hard, often for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Finally, after five gruelling years, she successfully completed her training and became one of Quebec’s first female surgeons.

      Lucille was working at Ste-Justine’s when a friend introduced her to a young Italian doctor who had come to Montreal to study pediatrics. His name was Piero Corti. She took little notice of him at first, but he later approached her in the hospital corridor and reintroduced himself. Piero was a good-looking young man, short and stocky, with a sparkle in his eyes and an engaging smile. She found him charming and amusing to be with, and she couldn’t stop laughing at the way he spoke both French and English with a singsong Italian accent. But Lucille was so engrossed in her studies that she did not give him another thought. Piero, however, was immediately attracted by the beauty and intensity of this young intern.

      The two came from very different backgrounds. Lucille had grown up in a working-class district of Montreal, while Piero was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Milan, the fifth in a family of ten. At school, Lucille strove to excel, but Piero preferred sports and fast motorbikes to homework. Despite their comfortable circumstances, Piero’s parents encouraged all their children to follow a profession, so he chose medicine and obtained a medical degree. He studied radiology and anesthesiology at the University of Milan.

      Like Lucille, Piero was attracted by the idea of living and working in the Third World. One of his brothers was a Jesuit missionary in Chad, West Africa. A brother-in-law had served as a doctor, first in India and then in Africa. Their stories fascinated him and he was determined to follow in their footsteps.

      Lucille had still to complete the final stage of her training. In order to practise as a surgeon, she needed one further diploma that required a period of training to be taken outside Canada. She sent letters to twenty top hospitals in the United States asking to be admitted to their surgical residence program. All twenty turned her down.

      Lucille was absolutely furious. I have an excellent academic record and impressive credentials. It must he the fact I’m a woman that has ruined my chance of a job in the United States, she realized. She buried her anger and decided instead to apply for a job in France. She immediately received offers of positions in both Paris and Marseilles.

      She chose Marseilles, a bustling Mediterranean seaport in the south of France. Now thirty-one years old, she said goodbye to her friends and family, and in September 1960, her father drove her to New York, where she boarded the S.S. Liberié.

      After a five-day crossing, they reached the French port of Le Havre. Lucille boarded the train for the journey south. She grew increasingly excited as they flew past charming French villages with red-tiled roofs. As they moved south, she could feel the heat of the sun and marvelled at the luminescence of the countryside that so captivated Impressionist painters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne.

      She caught her first sight of the Mediterranean when she reached Marseilles, a noisy and crowded city bordering the sea. She moved in with a French family and started work at once as an intern in pediatric surgery at the Hôpital de la Conception.

      Lucille adjusted quickly to life in Marseilles. She made many new friends, but she was startled by their ignorance of Canada. “In Montreal, do you have snow ten months a year?” one of them asked. “Is there ever any sun? What language do you speak?” inquired another. They were very surprised when she told them that many Canadians living in Montreal speak French at school, at university, even in the shops. They were just as surprised when she told them that in summer, Montrealers grow tomatoes! They thought Montreal must always be much too cold.

      She was amused to discover that the French spoken in France was different from the French she had learned in Canada. “The people here have difficulty understanding me because we have such different accents and different expressions,” she told her sister Lise. “Here, the children always call me ‘madam.’ At the hospital, the nurses call me ‘mademoiselle,’ the interns and several doctors call me ‘miss,’ and the boss, when he needs me, says ‘Go and find my Canadian.’”

      Lucille’s plan was to spend eight months in Marseilles before heading to Paris to finish her internship there. She was so caught up in her new life that she thought little about the Italian doctor she had met at Ste-Justine’s. Meanwhile Piero had left Montreal to work first with his brother in Africa and later with a friend who ran a hospital in India. During his travels, Piero had thought often about his meeting with Lucille in Montreal, and they had exchanged a few letters. Now that he was back home in Italy, he decided to visit her in Marseilles.

      One day, Lucille arrived home from the hospital and was surprised to find Piero waiting on her doorstep. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He looked a little sheepish as he explained: “You see, I have been thinking about you so often that I decided I would come and tell you all about my travels.”

      He invited her for dinner in the Old Port of Marseilles. They chose a table by the waters edge where they could hear the sea lapping against the breakwater. Piero ordered bouillabaisse, the hearty fish soup that is a popular specialty of the region, and a bottle of wine. As they savoured the meal, he talked about his trip.

      He had visited many different medical projects in Africa, both in Chad and in the Congo. He had also worked for a period in India. But it was during a visit to Uganda that he had made an exciting discovery. “A friend took me to the north of the country to see a small dispensary, St. Mary’s Hospital, near the village of Lacor,” he explained. “The clinic is tucked away in a remote corner of the region and has just forty beds. It is run by a dozen Italian missionary nuns, the Comboni sisters, who serve as nurses and midwives.” He paused, sipped some wine, and continued. “The minute I saw the facility, I knew this could be the answer to my dream to build a world-class hospital in a Third World country.”

      Piero was also deeply moved by the beauty of Uganda, a country that was eagerly approaching its independence from Britain in 1962. He desrcibed his impressions to Lucille and talked about his plans to build a hospital that would provide specialized services to supplement those of the district hospital in nearby Gulu. “My fondest dream,” Piero added, wide-eyed with excitement, “is that, in time, this small hospital could become one of the best in Uganda and one that would be completely run by Africans.”

      As he talked about his plans, Piero spoke faster and faster. “I know that what I am talking about is a gigantic task, but I feel certain that, with Gods help, I can make it happen.” On the more practical side, he believed that he could handle all the administrative duties of the new facility. He could recruit doctors from Italy