Albert Schweitzer: Playboy Interview

Albert Schweitzer is a quadruple doctor—of music, theology, philosophy and medicine. He had authored several definitive religious texts and had been named principal of Strasbourg Theological College before he reached 30. He was also—and still is—recognized as the world's foremost authority on organ architecture, as an eminent Bach scholar and as a celebrated interpreter of Bach's organ music. At the age of 38, in the full maturity of his multifaceted intellectual powers—culminating an eight-year period of spiritual stock-taking—Schweitzer elected to renounce the personal rewards and material blandishments of the Continent for a life of dedication to the sick in the jungles of French Equatorial Africa. Today, at a vigorous 88, he is acknowledged as one of the foremost philosophers of our age—and perhaps its most controversial medical figure.

A man of Schweitzer's stature might seem inhumanly Olympian if his towering intellectual and moral virtues did not shadow all-too-human shortcomings. He himself concedes that he is "arrogant" and "lacking in love." He has been accused of ruling his tropical mission as a benevolent dictator, of countenancing the most unsanitary hospital conditions in Africa, of being more interested in the welfare of animals than that of human beings and of clinging to a Kiplingesque tradition of big-brother colonialism. Few, however, will deny that he is one of the handful of great men our century has produced.

In the hope of probing the uncharted depths of this universal man, Playboy dispatched a special correspondent on a 1500-mile safari which ended with a journey by a dug-out canoe up the swirling Ogooué River, from the squalid timber village of Lambaréné, to the sandy beach in front of Schweitzer's jungle hospital. Beyond the beach stood the dark, smoky hospital buildings surrounded by a dusky sea of goats, chickens, patients and their relatives dotted with the bobbing white pith helmets which Schweitzer insists on as headgear for his medical staff.

Our three-day interview began at the hospital, where "le grand docteur" was supervising construction of a new residence building. It continued in the dining room where he and the staff shared dinner at a long refectory table, and where evenings he played his antique piano and read the Bible aloud in German by the light of a green-shaded paraffin-oil lamp. It resumed the following day at the nearby leper colony—built with his Nobel Peace Prize winnings -- en route to which he insisted on walking ahead of the car to shoo chickens out of harm's way and concluded in the hospital dispensary, where he sits for several hours each day attempting to diminish a mountainous backlog of unanswered correspondence from the outside world. Meanwhile, behind him a tattered little delegation of natives queued up for pills and potions. We first queried him about his half-century of isolation in his adopted homeland.