The Primeval Forest (Schweitzer Library)

"There, in this sorry world of ours, goes a great man." — Albert Einstein, on Albert Schweitzer

In July of 1913, thirty-eight-year-old medical doctor Albert Schweitzer gave up his position as a respected professor at the University of Strasbourg and celebrated authority on music and philosophy in order to go as a physician to French Equatorial Africa (present-day Gabon). The Primeval Forest is Schweitzer's own fascinating story of these eventful years — a thrilling tale of his amazingly successful attempt to practice modern medicine and surgery in the face of wild elephant raids, marauding leopards, famine, an flood — a story rich in human interest and high drama.

Schweitzer describes how he and his wife, a qualified nurse, worked to establish a hospital in the steaming jungle at Lambaréné. At first they treated patients in the open air, amid unbelievably primitive conditions — with few drugs, medicines, or adequate instruments. But they worked tirelessly, caring for as many as forty cases a day, battling the misery caused by sleeping sickness, leprosy, pestilence, and plague. And, as the years went on, they gradually built a more permanent hospital to alleviate the terrible suffering of the Congo people.

• Author
• Albert Schweitzer, William H. Foege

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 240

• Publisher
• Johns Hopkins University Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780801859588

• Genres
• history, biography, africa, memoir, gabon, travel

• Release date
• 1998