Albert Schweitzer: The humanist and jungle doctor from Lambarene

The recipe is very simple. You take sulfur powder, raw palm oil, oil residue from sardine cans and soft soap, then the patient is “painted” with it. Give him a portion of ointment in a tin can “so he can paint himself twice at home,” and success soon follows. “The itching subsides on the second day,” notes the doctor. “My scabies ointment made me widely famous in just a few weeks.”

Scabies was one of the more harmless ailments that Albert Schweitzer had to treat after he arrived at the Lambarene mission station in what is now Gabon in 1913. In the settlement a few kilometers south of the equator, the tropical doctor treats “mainly skin ulcers of various kinds, malaria, sleeping sickness, leprosy, elephantiasis, heart disease, bone suppurations and tropical dysentery”, the painful amoebic dysentery. Sometimes it also happens that “a canoe brought a young man whose right thigh had been broken and horribly mangled by a hippopotamus in Lake Sonange”.

Doing good among the natives

The first 30 years of Schweitzer’s life, who was born on January 14, 1875 in Kaysersberg in Upper Alsace, did not look like he would devote himself to two and a half decades of illness and hardship in Africa. At the age of 24 he received his doctorate in philosophy, followed by his doctorate in theology at the age of 25. The young man, who would have easily won a Nietzsche-likeness competition with his bushy mustache, was also a gifted organ player. At the age of 28, he began working on his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, which was soon published in several languages. A brilliant career lay ahead of him, but in 1905, when Albert Schweitzer had just turned 30, he gave up his career to begin further studies, namely medicine at the University of Strasbourg.

The reason for this was not the desire for another academic foothold. Schweitzer describes his motivation as follows: “I had read about the physical misery of the natives of the jungle and heard about it from missionaries,” he writes in his autobiography “Between Water and Jungle,” published in 1921. “The more I thought about it, the more incomprehensible it seemed to me that we Europeans care so little about the great humanitarian task that faces us in the distance.” He goes on to demand that “our society as such must take on the humanitarian task recognize as their own. The time must come when volunteer doctors, sent and supported by her, will go out into the world and do good among the natives.”

Schweitzer doesn’t just leave it at pious words. He completed his medical studies in 1912, received his doctorate on “the psychiatric assessment of Jesus” and thus earned three doctorates. In the same year he was appointed professor of theology. But instead of resting on his academic laurels, in March 1913 he embarked on a journey to the banks of the Ogowe to Lambarene, where he initially worked as a “jungle doctor” for four and a half years. Over the next few decades, he repeatedly set off for the poor settlement, built a hospital there and treated thousands of patients. Some of the sick come from hamlets hundreds of kilometers away to be treated by the “grand doctor”. In total, Schweitzer will work in Africa for more than 25 years – mostly accompanied and helped by his wife Helene, a trained nurse.

What actually drives the current chief physicians and other doctors?

Now it may be unfair to compare the life achievements of a figure of the century like Albert Schweitzer with the work of today’s doctors. Although many doctors of our time play an instrument, the medical orchestras and string quartets among “colleagues” demonstrate it. Some medical students also take seminars in philosophy or art history, creating model careers for educated middle-class people. But it is rare for outstanding theoretical training and practical skills to be used where they are particularly urgently needed. Why actually? Why are doctors like Schweitzer and Rudolf Virchow so rare? Virchow, who was not only a world-renowned scientist in the 19th century, but also worked as a doctor and social politician against poverty and disease and also promoted the sewage system in Berlin? Does it have to be such exceptional phenomena that stand up for the common good and those who are particularly dependent on help? What actually drives the current chief physicians and other doctors?

Today, some doctors from local clinics at the peak of their careers offer their skills in Dubai, Qatar or Saudi Arabia. There, too, some surgical procedures may not be sufficiently practiced, but the motivation for this form of development aid is probably not to make the poorest of the poor healthy. Of course, there are also doctors from Germany who treat in needy regions such as Ethiopia or Nepal, train young medical professionals there and use their vacation for this. But that someone puts their professional life entirely at the service of a good cause? In the emergency area, not only lends a hand in medical care, but also cuts beams and covers roofs so that the makeshift hospital can go into operation soon, where can you find that?

Schweitzer has to fight against all sorts of hardships, such as fending off the termites that threaten to destroy his wooden practice and hospital rooms. It has to withstand storms, spiders, snakes and your own illness – in extreme heat, in the rainy season and in extreme humidity. But “no matter how limited the resources are, what you can achieve with them is a lot,” he notes. How he would like the private donors from Europe who support his work to “see the newly bandaged patients climbing or being carried down the hill.” Or follow the grateful gestures “with which an old woman with a heart condition describes to me how she was able to breathe and sleep again on digitalis.”

Schweitzer rejects collaboration with Joseph Goebbels, “with a Central African greeting”

Schweitzer develops his ethic of “reverence for life,” which he explains in a sermon with simple, true words: “What is good is: preserving and promoting life; is bad: inhibiting and destroying life.” Accordingly, “experiencing other lives is the great event for the world.” Compassion and humanity can be expressed in more complicated ways. Schweitzer promotes service to others tirelessly and with clear messages when he goes on concert and lecture tours in Europe. And he cannot be captured. The correspondence is lost, but when Joseph Goebbels wants to win him over as a figurehead for the Nazi regime and signs his letter “With a German greeting,” Schweitzer refuses any cooperation and signs it “With a Central African greeting.” When the GDR later wanted to win over the peace friend and opponent of the Vietnam War, he remained at a friendly distance.

In 1951 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1954 he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had been awarded for 1952. He essentially used the prize money to complete the leper village in Lambarene. His fame continued to grow after World War II. During this time, Schweitzer was occasionally accused of vanity and self-dramatization, as well as a paternalistic and colonialist attitude. He did a lot of good things and talked and wrote extensively about them. He was a child of his time, but represented a timeless ethic of reverence for life. He saw all people as brothers and yet in Africa he remained “the elder in his younger brother’s country throughout his life,” as Nils Ole Oermann takes up a quote from Schweitzer in his biography. The fact that contributions appeared that scratched the “Schweitzer myth” was also due to the fact that some observers from afar had expected “a paradise of good-naturedness and generosity” in Lambarene, but they also found strictness and hierarchy there or had to realize that Schweitzer was because of regular Thefts left “nothing unlocked”. Nevertheless, there is always talk of the respect and admiration that the doctor found for his patients and helpers.

Schweitzer’s achievement was to encourage people to do practical things and to contribute to this with his small hospital in the jungle “as an attempt at a lived ethos” (Oermann). The name Lambarene, which means “We want to try” in the local language, fits Schweitzer’s unity of life and teaching. When Schweitzer died on September 4, 1965 at the age of 90, he was deeply revered and admired in his place of work. He made his own wooden coffin in 1964; a simple cross marks his grave behind the hospital.