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14.1.1875 - 4.9.1965
ALBERT SCHWEITZER"A great tyrant of brotherly love ... "”His heart was good, his thinking sublime, his art gifted.... He was tough, but only on himself. He thought a sense of duty and discipline as being natural virtues. He was, at the same time, strong and gentle as well as mild and stubborn. He was a wise and wonderful man.” Claus Jacobi, biographer of the tropical diseases hospital in Lambarene characterised the German doctor, theologian, musician and philosopher in these terms. Schweitzer became known across the world in 1913 as the "jungle doctor". He set up his jungle hospital in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon). There, lives were saved on a daily basis and child mortality was as low as in a Swiss hospital.... It was only over a period of years that he was able to build the hospital with an intensive care unit and leper village through international donations and the proceeds from his lecture tours, organ concerts and money from friends. He was tireless in asking questions and subjected all systems to an ethical examination. He eventually found the central formula of his philosophy: "reverence for life." To Winston Churchill he was a "genius of humanity"; John F. Kennedy described him as "a moral authority of the century that surpassed everything". Despite the many books and films made about him and his Nobel peace prize award, Schweitzer remained a quiet man, working day in and day out as a doctor for tropical diseases in the heat of Africa to the state of exhaustion. Albert Schweitzer was an opponent of atomic tests and nuclear armament. He stressed continually that it is people who threaten the Earth and that it is people in whose care it has been left to make a habitable world out the inhabited one. | ||
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