Professor Ubaldo Mengozzi, 92 years old, former head of the emergency room at the Morgagni-Pierantoni hospital in Forlì and one of the creators of the single health emergency number 118, has died due to serious injuries sustained in a road accident. local press.
Last November 29th Mengozzi was hit by a car while walking a short distance from his home.
He initially recovered but his age and some complications that arose were fatal.
Emergency and emergency medicine owes a lot to Mengozzi, inspirer of entire generations of professionals and founder, in 1971 in Chieti, of the first school of emergency medicine in the world.
For decades he was the backbone of the Forlì emergency room.
His fixed idea, his former colleagues tell the local edition of Il Carlino, or rather his obsession, was to create a single emergency number, "like 9-1-1 in America", he repeated.
Mengozzi was also the creator and president of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine (Simeu), of which he was still honorary president.
"For all those who were lucky enough to know him - writes Simeu on his website - there remains the memory of an inexhaustible energy, of a verbal vehemence dictated by passion, humanity, dedication".
"Today we remember him through his words, in the Senate hearing in 1998: 'Emergency Medicine must become the flagship of Public Health for these reasons: urgency is binding, the non-urgent patient has everything the time to choose...; the urgently ill patient is a passive subject in the hands of others and in the place where the event occurs. Precisely in the most important and sometimes decisive moment of his existence he finds himself unable to make choices and he is forced to passively accept the help that is offered to him at that time and in that place".
Mengozzi leaves behind his wife Mirella.
The funeral date has yet to be defined.
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