ABSTRACT
In 1913, a young, though already much accomplished, Albert Schweitzer arrived in Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) determined to devote his considerable talents to alleviating the misery he saw all around him. Trained as a philosopher, theologian, musician, and physician, he gained worldwide fame as a medical missionary who had given up a promising career in Europe to live out the rest of his life assisting the poor of sub-Saharan Africa, both directly by nursing the sick and needy, and indirectly by fixing the world’s attention on the plight of the continent’s poor. Although, to a certain extent, his experiences followed a path well trod by the many Christian missionaries who had traveled to sub-Saharan Africa since the fifteenth century, his life and philosophy also represent one aspect of a significant transformation in prevailing attitudes toward poverty and its relief throughout much of the world between approximately 1880 and 1945. Schweitzer based his assistance not on the promise of adding more souls to the ranks of the world’s Christians, but on what he termed “the Fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain.” In other words, the affluent who had experienced suffering in their lives had a duty to ease the pain of those less fortunate without recompense. Schweitzer expected little from his patients. He saw them neither as heathens in need of spiritual solace first and foremost, nor as “noble savages” who carried some essential lesson for corrupted civilizations. And he was not alone in adopting this approach. As the Irish nun Marie Helena Martin explained when she founded the Medical Missionaries of Mary Catholic order in 1937:
Medical Mission work presupposes doing physical good to all who ask us – as Our Blessed Lord did. The question of conversion or change of life may come later. . . . It is not for us to go out preaching the Gospel – although we are always ready to answer our patients’ enquiries – we pave the way for the acceptance of Our Lord’s teaching.
