The Primeval ForestPaperback, 1 July 1998

In July of 1913, 38-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, and flood. Schweitzer describes how he and his wife, a qualified nurse, worked to establish a hospital in the steaming jungle at Lambarene. 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 persons 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 Congolese people.