Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

methusalem (67)in #steemiteducation • 8 years ago

After putting my note about influence on example from Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) in my previous post I could not stop thinking he was our hero as children in school.

We did the whole history of him in school under history and we all wanted to be like him.

Then I started wondering how many young people still knew or know this wonderful man.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was an Alsatian-German religious philosopher, musicologist, and medical missionary in Africa. He was known especially for founding the Schweitzer Hospital, which provided unprecedented medical care for the natives of Lambaréné in Gabon.

Albert Schweitzer was born, under German rule and he had a good childhood as his father was a minister and they did not have a bad life.

He says when he was eight years old he had his first experience with his maker.

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He was playing with a friend and they were shooting at birds that were singing in a tree. Just before he shot he made a silent vow to miss and then chased the birds away so that his friend could not shoot.

He says at that moment the sun came out and the church bells were ringing. He then realised that to him it sounded “like a voice from heaven” and he ran home.

When he was ten years old he was sent to live with his grandaunt and uncle and these older people taught him about ethic code and religion.

He went to an excellent school and finished when he was 18 years old.

He loved music, and he was a lecturer until he was 30 years old. At that time he realised he had to do something else.

However, one spring morning in 1905, he experienced a stunning religious revelation: it came to him that at some point in the years just ahead he must renounce facile success and devote himself unsparingly to the betterment of mankind's condition.

He then started studying medicine and left all he had done till then behind.

In 1913 the Schweitzers journeyed to what was then French Equatorial Africa. There, after various setbacks, they founded the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Lambaréné, on the Ogooué River, "at the edge of the primeval forest." This area now lies within the independent West African republic of Gabon.

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In 1915 he was on a boat on his way and saw some hippopotamus on a sandbank where he suddenly remember that incident that happened when he was 8 years old, and had chased the birds away to save there life. He had been thinking about it for many years.

"The phrase Reverence for Life struck me like a flash." He had anticipated this phrase more than 3 decades earlier in his refusal to shoot his slingshot at the sweetly singing birds; now, it became the coping stone of his philosophical system and of his everyday life at the hospital.

He became well known around the world and a wealthy man was so impressed by him, this man was in his late thirties but he had a lot of money and he went back to college and also became a doctor.

He started a hospital in Haiti and he named it, the Albert Schweitzer Hospital. Larimer Melon and his wife Gwen saved many lives here and did wonderful work.

Albert also got very well-known through his autobiography that he wrote: it is really a wonderful biography to read.

At the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922), Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1925), and Out of My Life and Thought (1933).

Despite his busy life he still made time to lecture at universities in the U.S.A

This just made him more loved and known.

The most wonderful thing that happened to him is that he received the Nobel Prize in 1952.

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He then really started writing and about nuclear power that should not have to be used.

1957 and 1958 notable appeals to the superpowers in the name of humanity, urging them to renounce nuclear-weapons testing. He died at Lambaréné on Sept. 4, 1965; at the time, he was still working vigorously on the third volume of his monumental Philosophy of Civilization.

It is such a pity that our children do not learn about this wonderful man anymore.

Here are a few questions to answer.