Episode Details

Albert Schweitzer was a world-class organist, a groundbreaking theologian, and a philosopher who abandoned all of it to build a hospital in the equatorial African jungle. He started in a converted chicken coop in Lambarene, Gabon, treated thousands of patients, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and spent fifty years practicing medicine in conditions that appalled visiting doctors — while his philosophy of "reverence for life" influenced ethical thinking worldwide.

This episode traces Schweitzer from his Alsatian childhood through his theological revolution, the decision to study medicine at thirty, and the decades in Lambarene that made him one of the twentieth century's most celebrated and most criticized humanitarian figures.

• Schweitzer's early career as an organist and theologian and the radical decision to become a doctor at thirty
• The founding of the Lambarene hospital in a converted chicken coop in French Equatorial Africa
• The Nobel Peace Prize, the "reverence for life" philosophy, and his anti-nuclear activism
• The paternalism criticisms and the debate over whether his methods helped or harmed