The Primeval Forest: Including "On the Edge of the Primeval Forest" and "More from the Primeval Forest" (The Albert Schweitzer Library)

The author of this text tells how, in July of 1913, as a 38-year-old medical doctor, he gave up his position as a respected professor at the University of Strasbourg and celebrated authority on music and philosophy in order to go as a physician to French Equatorial Africa (present day Gabon). The text is Schweitzer's own story of these years - a tale of his successful attempt to practice modern medicine and surgery in the face of wild elephants raids, marauding leopards, famine, flood and local superstition and ignorance. Scweitzer describes how he and his wife, a qualified nurse, worked to establish a hospital in the steaming jungle at Lambarene.