In Schweitzer's Footsteps

In late 1947, William Larimer Mellon Jr., scion of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was rich and 37, with a pretty wife and children and a new house on a smooth-running Arizona ranch. He was looking through the pages of LIFE one day when he stopped at a picture story about Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who 51 years ago gave up a brilliantly versatile career -as theologian, organist, teacher and musicologist -to become a doctor and work among the natives in the African jungle. "There was a picture of Dr. Schweitzer and an antelope," Mellon recalls. "I had thought he was an organist."

Gradually a strange and consuming determination took hold of Mellon. His wife Gwen gulped when she heard it: sell the ranch, become a physician and follow in Schweitzer's footsteps. Larry Mellon had plenty of money, but both age and education were against him -he had left Princeton after his freshman year. Mellon wrote to the great Dr. Schweitzer himself, and back came eight pages of encouragement and advice.

"He told me just how to proceed,'' says Mellon. "He advised me what subjects to take in medical school. He said not to study tropical medicine, that if I came there he could teach me more tropical medicine in a week than I could learn in school in three months." The Mellons moved to New Orleans. Larry completed his premed work in two summers and a regular term at Tulane University, and ground his way through Tulane's Medical School in four years. "I didn't know whether I was going to be able to make the grade," said Dr. Mellon when at last it was over. Gwen Mellon learned to be a laboratory technician and "scrub" nurse (in charge of instruments in an operating room).

Originally Mellon had planned to set up his hospital near Africa's Congo River, then he switched to Haiti because its population is denser and its medical needs acute. Ninety miles from Port-au-Prince, in the Artibonite Valley, Mellon found a site and began to build.

Constructing a modern hospital with unskilled labor was almost as grueling as studying medicine, took nearly two years. But last week, with no ceremonies or speeches, the trim little Albert Schweitzer Hospital opened its doors and went to work. It has 50 beds, three air-conditioned operating rooms and an "emergency entrance" designed with an eye to the fact that the only ambulance available to most of the region's poor is the Haitian burro. Water and outdoor cooking facilities are provided for outpatients coming down from the hills. Present staff consists of four doctors and a lab technician in addition to the Mellons, and all have been studying Creole in preparation for their patients. Patients are expected to pay only what they can -token payments of chickens, fruits and vegetables "to satisfy their pride." The expected operating deficit: approximately $200,000 a year.

Quiet, white-haired Dr. Mellon and his wife, both Disciples of Christ, still exchange letters every month with 81-year-old Dr. Schweitzer in his jungle headquarters at Lambarene. As the hospital was about to open its doors, Schweitzer wrote: "The beginnings are always difficult. But you are courageous."

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