anyone recall Albert Schweitzer?

[medeak]

my son who has written 2 thesis didn't have a clue who he was...been to the most elite universities..am in shock. What an incredible humanitarian who valued the sanctity of life. Perhaps this is what is wrong...nobel prize winner who at a dinner couldn't kill an ant...and young generation has no idea who he is?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer

[davepc]

1. This is the only reason I know the name...

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x153.xml

[Tangerine LaBamba]

2. That's heartbreaking,

but, at the same time, I can believe it. Great humanitarians don't get a whole lot of press, especially the old white guys who chose to live in the jungle.

I wonder how many know that he was a brilliant musician, and his interpretations of Bach are outstanding. I have both volumes of this - http://www.amazon.com/Albert-Schweitzer-plays-Bach-Vol-1/dp/B000000WXY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1242799878&sr=1-1 - and they never fail to transport me.......................

[medeak]

5. thank you

ordered to give to all my sons!

[Ken Burch]

8. on M*A*S*H, the immortal Major Frank Burns had this to say about Dr. Schweitzer:

"If he was a GOOD doctor, he'd be in Beverly Hills, treating the wealthy".

[EFerrari]

9. LOL

[Tangerine LaBamba]

12. Once again,

I miss the brilliance of that show.

At least I've got "House".

[Hardrada]

3. Yes, of course. Besides his work in Africa he was also a noted

scholar of J.S. Bach and helped introduce his organ works to a wider world. I somewhere have some recordings of Bach featuring Dr. Schweitzer playing in concert. Of course, I knew about him when he was still among us.

[Ken Burch]

6. At the public radio station here, I found a four-record set(remember records?)of Schweitzer playing

Bach organ pieces.

Something else interesting I heard about Schweitzer's religious heritage was that, in the little town in Alsace-Lorraine where he was born and raised, the Lutheran church he attended also had an altar for the celebration of the Catholic mass. Apparently such combined Catholic-Protestant structures were common in that region for some reason, and perhaps this led to him holding a less-sectarian attitude towards his Christian faith.

[medeak]

11. 94 yr old parents have saved every "Life" magazine

and recall one of Albert on the cover from the l950's...must go through the dust to find it on next visit. Thank you for your comments and memory. Is there a chance the History Channel may show documentary pray tell?

[MADem]

4. There are gaps in the education of the later generations. The prevailing attitude is

that a lot of things we considered important are today viewed as less important. It's acceptable now to spell "Are you" as R U. Even when not texting.

They clump history and geography and civics and current events all together in a single subject, and don't do it justice.

The sad thing is that those that don't remember their history often repeat it. We don't need to go through that crap again. Something to be said for getting old and popping off, I guess--it's nature's way of allowing people who have put up with the bullshit once not having to go around the maypole yet again.

[Creena]

13. I suppose that explains the liberal use of my library card.

I attended high school from 1999-2003 and completely agree that everything is clumped together, leaving little time for proper understand of each subject. If I wanted to further learn about many topics, I found it my responsibility to do so outside of class. However, as a result, I also dealt with severe ridicule from my peers. Being punished for intellectualism, or simply a quest for knowledge, does not help shape future generations.

[MADem]

21. When your peers are waiting on you at Denny's, or waving to you from the

back of the garbage truck, sweating hanging on to their jobs because of cutbacks, they might rethink their ridiculing conduct.

Or maybe not. You shouldn't let your peers trouble you, in any event--knowledge IS power. Perhaps they'll grow up one day and work on catching up--the one good thing about this country nowadays is that "lifelong learning" is not only accepted but encouraged. If only more would avail themselves of it!

[Ken Burch]

7. Hadn't realized he became a Unitarian at the age of 86.

I've always respected that tradition.

[WCGreen]

10. Wasn't that Alfalfa of little rascal's fame...

I couldn't resist.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

14. I can't believe this,

but your post stayed with me for these past several minutes, like I hadn't answered you properly, or something.

Something nagging at me.

I just realized what it was:

When I was a little girl, my Aunt Angelina, who had been a Navy nurse during WWII, went off to work with Dr. Schweitzer in Lambarene. I think she stayed there for a long time, maybe five years.

How could I have forgotten that?

[Ken Burch]

15. That's an amazing memory, Tangerine.

Did your aunt ever talk about her time at Lambarene?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

16. Not that I recall ..........

She was a strange person, could be very brusque, and I was often scared of her. Yet, she was never anything but sweet with me. She has no patience with fools, I think, and maybe that's what I saw in her. She was intent on getting the job done, whatever "the job" was and she focused, without much interest in the niceties.

She married a very nice man, and she became the one who was right there when anyone in the family got sick. Big Italian family, so that was almost a full-time job. She was always the first one there at the hospital, and she took over. Doctors loved dealing with her, and the nurses were very respectful of her.

I remember being very little, pre-school, and I was in the hospital, a very sick kid. Scary time, and I remember Ang leaving over the railing on my bed, stroking my hair, smiling at me. I remember that I felt safe, seeing her, feeling her touch.

What's funny is that, as I got older, I began to look like her, which isn't a bad thing at all. She was quite striking.

But, she'd never go to funerals. She said, "I take care of them the best I can, and after that, it's someone else's job."

I think she was just a big softie, and a lot of what she was about was simply a cover-up.

I wish I'd asked her about her experiences in WWII - she was on the Queen Mary, ferrying wounded troops home and taking fresh troops to Europe. I wish I'd asked her about working with Albert Schweitzer.

But I was just a kid. No clue. And now, alas, she's gone. They're all gone, so just some of the nieces and nephews were there for her funeral.

How nice is it to remember Aunt Angelina tonight .........................

[medeak]

17. what a wonderful tribute

and thank you so much for sharing... wow..am certain there were a lot of patients to greet her when she went on to the next level...you are so great at expressing things.. am visualising Aunt Angelina right now. xoxo

[Ken Burch]

25. This is kind of making me wish I'd met your aunt.

Thanks for posting all that.

[csziggy]

26. You should write out everything you can remember about her

And other relatives and pass that along to your living relatives.

One of the things I enjoy most about my paternal grandmother's papers are her written "biographies" of her parents and grandparents. Not just the bare facts - those we could get from public records for the most part. But her descriptions of their personalities, physical appearances or other little tidbits about them that she noted.

[MineralMan]

18. Back in my junior high school days

in the late 50s, I went through a biography period and read many, many biographies. Among them was one about Schweitzer. I was very impressed. Later, when I took an interest in pipe organs, I found some recordings of him playing.

These days, I doubt if you'll find a biography of the man in most libraries, which have weeded out older books to replace them with less interesting stuff.

[Odin2005]

19. I'm 23 I only learned about him recently.

A truly wonderful man.

[HamdenRice]

20. I think the reason is, that in historical hindsight, he wasn't that important

and the amount of emphasis he is given has been adjusted accordingly. If you take a modern course in African History, Schweitzer probably wouldn't even be mentioned.

I'm sure he was a kind person whose heart was in the right place, but it turns out his medical missionary work was somewhat self-dramatizing, and there were many, many more effective individuals, doctors, public health officials and institutions than him. In fact, it's kind of hard to understand why he got as much publicity as he did.

[Hardrada]

23. He was a theologian also and could have had an illustrious

European career in that and in music but he gave all that up for his medical missionary work. He was a great rarity and was not a publicity hound that I know of. Contrast him with people like Billy Graham who were not subversive of war and capitalism.

[HamdenRice]

24. I'm sure he was a good person, but history writing generally focuses on the impact people have

He has a complicated legacy. But if you were writing a curriculum for either a world history survey or an African History course, you would be hard pressed to include him against competing subjects to focus on.

For one thing, different African countries have different population levels and levels of importance. In a survey or book, an historian is going to focus on the countries that are important because of population, industry and historical significance -- South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Congo and Ethiopia, for example. Schweitzer went to one of the smallest, most remote, least populated colonies -- Gabon.

Also, if you were writing about mid 20th century missionaries or philanthropic work in Africa in terms of historical impact, he's just not up there with say Father Trevor Huddelston or the Carnegie Inquiry into poverty in South Africa of the 30s or the impact of public health campaigns in Nigeria. There is a lot of really good new historical writing about the introduction of modern medicine and public health in Africa, and in that genre, Schweitzer doesn't really have much impact.

It's kind of like if you were teaching or writing a history of North America, focusing on Schweitzer is kind of like focusing on some lone eccentric medical missionary in a small town in Sasketchewan or Idaho.

I'm not saying he was not a good or brilliant man. Just that it makes sense that students don't learn about him any more.

Even the Wiki article on Schweitzer notes that when reporters actually went to his clinics they were disappointed or even appalled, and that other medical pioneers were doing much more significant work in Africa, especially in the training of African personnel.

Most research papers I've seen about Schweitzer in the last decades were along the lines of "wtf? Why did this guy get so much publicity?" and he is more a figure for media studies about the west than African studies. He seems important to Americans of a certain age because he was a large media presence when we were growing up, but it's not clear why western media came to focus on him as some sort of symbol or media creation.

[medeak]

27. it's a shame your research doesn't reflect the personality

as he was larger than life in a humble sense and attracted so many people that visited him and were moved. Yes..will def dig up that old Life magazine now. ;-)

[ThomWV]

22. In a nation where HS graduates can not find Europe on a map I'm not surprised

Why would we think that colleges - elite or not - would be any different?

Think about this - these days we teach to the test at every level of education. Its easy to see in our public schools, where the tests are Government sanctioned, its harder to notice when its our colleges and the test is if graduates can find jobs or not. Either way all you teach them is just what they need to know to excel at the test and all the rest falls by the wayside.