Still they come, all year round, to see the famed old man in his storied jungle setting. Public figures like Adlai Stevenson, starry-eyed U.S. Peace Corpsmen, spinster schoolteachers realizing a longstanding dream—all come for a visit to Dr. Albert Schweitzer. At his mission three miles upstream from the Gabonese village of Lambaréné, "the great white doctor," now 88, affably greets them, autographing his books in a fine, steady hand. Yet, after devoting nearly two-thirds of his life ministering to the sick of equatorial Africa and being widely regarded as a near saint, Schweitzer is an anachronism in today's Africa. After a journey to Lambaréné, TIME Correspondent Jon Randal reported why:
Once, to see Schweitzer, travelers had to be paddled the 175 miles from Port-Gentil on the Atlantic. Now they arrive by air from the Gabonese capital of Libreville and put down at Lambaréné's modern airport, not far from a modern, antiseptic government hospital. On the short trip up the Ogooué River, the visitors pass natives skimming by in brand-new boats powered by Evinrude outboards. Finally they reach Schweitzer's hospital. Set ghostlike amid wild palms and tangled jungle undergrowth, its tin roofs and ramshackle wooden buildings are worthy of Rain or The Heart of Darkness.
Changeless Isolation. In the half-century since Schweitzer came to Lambaréné with his wife Hélène and performed his first operation in a converted hen house, the mission has expanded but otherwise changed little. At the river landing there are only pirogues, crude dugout canoes, the one type of river ambulance Schweitzer will use. ("Brancardier! Brancardier!" [stretcher bearer] the oarsmen cry when they arrive with an emergency.) The hospital compound is without telephone, running water or refrigeration, has electricity only in the main building, which houses the tiny, antiquated operating theater. Sterilization is carried out in an outdoor lean-to and the only toilet is an outhouse for the use of the foreign staff.
With a capacity for some 400 patients, Schweitzer's clinic is forever jammed. The sick, carrying paper tags with their names, villages and tribes, wait for hours to see the doctors, are bedded down on straw-mattress cots in dark, stench-ridden huts whose earth floors are awash during the rainy season. Outside, over open fires, the patients' women relatives cook, while a horde of chickens, dogs and goats (protected under Schweitzer's "reverence for life" mystique by which no living thing should be unnecessarily disturbed) roam at will, adding freely to the surrounding filth. When a patient dies and his body is unclaimed, it is wrapped in a fern-and-palm-leaf shroud, laid in a wooden box, and buried in the bush.