Dr. Richner was born in Zurich on March 13, 1947. Little is known about his early life, but by his own account, after receiving his medical degree in 1973 and working at the Zurich Children’s Hospital for a year, he was asked by the Swiss Red Cross to travel to Cambodia on a relief mission in 1974.
There he treated children at a hospital called Kantha Bopha, named for a Cambodian princess who had died of leukemia as a toddler.
At the time, the country was in the grip of a civil war between the United States-backed regime of the Cambodian general Lon Nol and Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge.
On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge forces swept into Phnom Penh and overthrew the government, ushering in a nearly four-year period of repressive agrarian Communism. The new regime destroyed the country’s medical system and systematically targeted intellectuals, including doctors, for execution. Most members of the medical staff at Kantha Bopha were killed.
Dr. Richner fled the country, returned to Switzerland and established a pediatric practice, but he never forgot his time in Cambodia. In 1992, after a peace treaty had been signed between the warring factions, he returned and was asked by Cambodia’s king, Norodom Sihanouk, to help restore the Kantha Bopha.
“It was not the will of Dr. Richner to have this huge hospital,” Dr. Laurent, the deputy director, said. “He had only one goal, which was to save the maximum number of children with the best quality of treatment.”
This led to clashes with Cambodian officials. In one episode Dr. Richner was criticized for spending lavishly when he imported a CT scanner to diagnose tuberculosis. Enraged by the implication that Cambodian children did not deserve top-of-the-line treatment, he sent a young Dr. Santy to France for a graduate course in pediatric radiology so that at least one person in the hospital network would know how to use the machine.
