Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer gave up three careers at thirty to train as a doctor and spent the next fifty years running a hospital on a river in Gabon, which made him for a generation the most admired man in the world and, for the generation after, the type of the colonial paternalist. He was born in 1875 at Kaysersberg in Alsace, four years after Germany annexed it, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and was by 1905 a lecturer in theology at Strasbourg, the organist the Paris Bach Society sent for, and the author of a book on the historical Jesus, published in 1906, that argued the Gospels showed a man who expected the world to end in his own lifetime and was wrong; the argument is still taught. He had decided at twenty-one to give himself to scholarship until thirty and to direct service afterwards, and in 1905 he began medicine. In 1913 he and his wife Helene Bresslau, who had trained as a nurse for the purpose, sailed for Lambaréné on the Ogooué, a mission station of the Paris Missionary Society, and opened a hospital in a chicken shed. As Germans in a French colony they were interned in 1917 and sent to France; he came back in 1924 and rebuilt it as a village of wards where patients' families camped and cooked, which visitors in the 1950s found squalid and he defended as the only way Africans would come. The idea he is remembered for came to him in 1915 on a barge on the river: reverence for life, the claim that the will to live in every creature is the ground of ethics, which he worked out in books he wrote at night between operations. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 1952 and he spent the money on a leper village. From 1957, at Einstein's urging, he broadcast against nuclear testing and the Cold War took him less seriously afterwards. His view of Africans was that of an elder brother who did not think the younger would grow up soon, and he said so; independent Gabon kept the hospital anyway. He died at Lambaréné in September 1965 at ninety and is buried there beside his wife.
- Lived: 1875 CE – 1965 CE
- Nationality: Alsatian
- Roles: physician, theologian, musician
