Where did Albert Schweitzer grow up and live?

📍Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, Lambaréné, Gabon

1913 – 1965

“I arrived in Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa — what is now Gabon — in 1913, to build a hospital in the jungle. I had given up careers in philosophy, theology and music to study medicine specifically for this purpose, and when I arrived I found that my consulting room for the first weeks was a chicken coop. I built the hospital with my own hands alongside the local people, and I lived there — with some interruptions forced by the two world wars — for the rest of my life. The forest and the river were my companions: the Ogooué moved past the hospital day and night, carrying canoes of patients from villages a hundred miles upstream. I conducted Bach on a specially constructed tropical organ in the evenings, wrote philosophy by lamplight, and operated on whatever needed operating on from dawn until the light failed.”

👍 LovedThe absolute necessity of the work — the hospital was the only medical facility for hundreds of miles and its need was beyond question. The forest itself, which I never ceased to find magnificent. The evenings of music and writing that balanced the days of medicine.

👎 DislikedThe isolation from European intellectual life, which I had loved deeply. The tropical diseases that took their toll on my own health over the decades. The difficulty of obtaining supplies and medicines in such a remote location.

Map showing where Albert Schweitzer lived — Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, Lambaréné, Gabon

🗺️ Approximate location today

Location associated with Albert Schweitzer

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Schweitzer, A. Out of My Life and Thought (1931, translated 1933), Henry Holt; Brabazon, J. Albert Schweitzer: A Biography (2000), Syracuse University Press; Nobel Peace Prize lecture (1954)