Albert Schweitzer

(1875 - 1965)

While a member of the theological faculty at the University of Strasbourg, Albert Schweitzer at the age of thirty published J.S. Bach: The Musician-Poet in 1905, the same year that he announced his desire to become a mission doctor. For the next six years he studied medicine at the university while continuing to teach there. In 1913 Schweitzer and his wife, a nurse, arrived in French Equatorial Africa, in present-day Gabon, and began to build a hospital. He worked in the area intermittently from 1927 to 1947.