(1875–1965)
Alsatian physician, humanitarian, theologian, missionary, and organist“Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.”
more infosource: quoted by Norman Cousins in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), paperback ed., 78.
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category: doctor, healing, health, medicine, patient
medium: nonfiction
notes: this quote is also referenced in Albert Schweitzer's Lambarene by Jo and Walter Munz (Rockland, ME: Penobscot Press, 2010): “Schweitzer found this process [of a native healing ceremony] as fascinating as I did. Indeed, we both learned to respect it as a kind of healing deeply embedded in African culture. Thus, it came as no surprise when, long after my years in Lambarene, I read about a conversation Schweitzer had with Norman Cousins, an American journalist who was editor of the Saturday Review in the 1960s. Cousins came to visit Dr. Schweitzer in Gabon and said, ‘What a good fortune for the people here to have a Doctor like you, so they do not depend any longer on their traditional healers.’ As the late Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani reports in one of his last books, Schweitzer did not like this remark, and replied, ‘What do you know about these healers?’ Cousins had to concede that he knew very little. Schweitzer continued: ‘Medicine men heal in the same way like we other physicians. The patient does not know it, but his real doctor is in himself. And we have success, when we give to this inner physician the opportunity to do his work.’”
via: Jack Fenner“You must give something to your fellow man. Even if it’s a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man’s help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.”
more infosource: Schweitzer: A Biography, by George N. Marshall and David Poling (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 299.
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category: humanity, service, volunteer
medium: biography
Albert Schweitzer