![]() ![]() His desire to serve was as profound as any of his clerical colleagues, but it was built, as will be seen, upon rebellious ethical foundations. Schweitzer's missionary experiment in Lambaréné was simultaneously radical and conformist, daring and self-protectively conservative. ![]() The village-hospital enabled him to tend the sick more effectively, but after the First World War it became more hierarchical and de-personalized. Schweitzer's self-belief enabled him to create a village-hospital where the sick could come with their families for treatment and refuge, and contributed to his idea of the ‘reverence for life’, a secularized ethics of compassion and environmental protection that made him famous in the West. Unlike his fellow missionaries, he never learned native languages, and his service was primarily grounded in a Nietzschean rejection of European conventionalities and a desire to develop his unique ‘ethical personality’. Although he worked in Africa for over fifty years, Schweitzer was strangely indifferent to the continent's culture. ![]() This work analyses Albert Schweitzer's complex relationship to Africa, and places him within the context of medical missionizing. ![]()
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