On the Edge of the Primeval Forest

The saga of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s personal life has deeply moved several generations in Europe.

Born in 1875, he was brought up at Gunsbach, in Alsace, where the cultures of France and Germany meet, and the influences of the Catholic and Protestant faiths mingle in unusual tolerance. His father was the local Protestant pastor. The family was deeply musical: both Albert’s grandfathers were well-known organists.

Discipline and concentration, added to his natural gifts, earned him a brilliant academic career Everything he touched he did supremely well. At Strasbourg, he took his doctorate with a thesis on the religious philosophy of Kant. In Paris, he studied organ music under Charles Marie Widor, one of the great musicians of his time and eventually surpassed his master in the interpretation of Bach. But in this flood of early success, Schweitzer remained pre-occupied with the suffering of others. At the age of twenty-one, he made his famous decision—that he would live for science and art until he was thirty, and thereafter would devote his life to serving humanity.

In this book he gives his reasons for renouncing his academic future in Europe to qualify as a doctor, and he describes the building and growth of his hospital at the edge of the damp disease-ridden Equatorial forest of the Belgian Congo. It has become a classic of its kind because of its simple sincerity, its understanding of the primitive mind, its accounts of the triumphs and tragedies of the enterprise, and above all because the personality of one of the most remarkable figures of modern times is reflected so vividly in his writing.