Albert Schweitzer Scholarship Fund

About the Albert Schweitzer Fund

The Albert Schweitzer Scholarship Fund exists to ensure that everyone—regardless of financial circumstances—has access to compassionate, expert homeopathic care. Our fund is named in honor of Albert Schweitzer, a French and German polymath, physician, and Nobel Prize winner. Schweitzer dedicated his life in service to others, and inspired one of our providers, Karl Robinson, to devote his life to the same. Read the full story of how Dr. Schweitzer influenced Karl’s life below.

“The year was 1967. The month was June and the Six Day War was going on. I was getting the news reports via short wave radio from a bed in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon.

Dr. Schweitzer had died in 1965 and his daughter, Rhena Eckert Schweitzer, was running the hospital as the administrator. We quickly became friends and she brought me several of her father’s books. I knew little of his life but On the Edge of the Primeval Forest and More from the Primeval Forest were about to change the course of my life forever.

I was on a trip around the world – or so I thought – when I burned my right leg on the manifold of my Honda motorcycle a few weeks earlier. The burn got infected and I realized I couldn’t go on until it got better. As I “happened” to be close to the Schweitzer Hospital I stopped in and a doctor there immediately diagnosed a “phagedenic ulcer.” Phagedenic ulcers, also known as Tropical ulcers, favor hot humid climates and, if untreated, rapidly become necrotic. I needed to be hospitalized, I was told, and so it was that I came under the spell of Albert Schweitzer as I read about his extraordinary life, first as a renowned theologian and philosopher, then as an expert organist and interpreter of J.S. Bach.

As an organist, he visited small churches in Alsace-Lorraine and advised on acoustics. Though already famous as a theologian, he decided at age 30 to study medicine for the express purpose of going to sub-Saharan Africa to treat the sick. There, in Lambaréné, on the banks of the Ogooué River he built a hospital. At the time, I was a freelance journalist and was motorcycling around Nigeria and Gabon, calling in on Peace Corps volunteers and writing stories about their lives in Africa then selling (or trying to sell) their stories to their hometown newspapers. The ulcer put a stop to my travels and landed me in a hospital bed reading about the extraordinary life of Dr. Schweitzer. The more I read, the more enthralled I became.

Then suddenly, unbidden, came the idea that I should become a doctor. I spent days trying to convince myself that it was an aberration and would pass. But there it was–Schweitzer at 30 deciding to study medicine and I, soon to be 30, to study medicine. Now, I was not so deluded as to compare myself with the renowned Dr. Schweitzer but I could not get rid of the idea that I was to study medicine and perhaps do some little good with the degree. There were obstacles. I had studied English literature at Yale and had deliberately avoided taking any science courses which, of course, meant that I needed to do all of the prerequisite pre-med courses.

But I was determined.

Back home in New Jersey, I enrolled in General Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and began biology, physics and chemistry. The following summer I managed biochemistry. Somehow, I passed and, by a hair’s breadth, got accepted into Hahnemann College in Philadelphia. Though named for the great Samuel Hahnemann, it offered straight allopathy.

In 2019 Hahnemann College was subsumed by Drexel University. My roommate at Hahnemann knew about homeopathy as his father graduated from Hahnemann in the late 1930s and he had studied some homeopathy. It wasn’t exactly an introduction, but at least I knew the word. I graduated from Hahnemann in the bottom ten percent of my class. Had it been English literature, I would probably have been in the top ten percent. I did an internship at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village followed by a residency in internal medicine at Harlem Hospital in Harlem, New York.

One is drawn to those persons and experiences that mold and shape us as by an invisible and irresistible thread. Had I not burned my leg on the manifold of my motorcycle and had it not gotten infected and had I not ended up in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital and had I not been captivated by reading about the life of Dr. Schweitzer, I very likely would have continued working as a journalist.

Thus, a series of improbable events culminated in my becoming a Doctor of Medicine.”
~ Karl Robinson, MD

Contribute to the Scholarship Fund

Global Natural Health Solutions is committed to bringing high-quality homeopathy to as many people as possible. We established the Albert Schweitzer Scholarship Fund so that our services can be made available to those who can benefit from homeopathic care regardless of financial constraints.

Our hope is that interested individuals and organizations will help sustain the Albert Schweitzer fund through their financial support and by helping us to promote the fund to their networks.

Would you like to contribute to the Albert Schweitzer Scholarship fund and help make homeopathy accessible to individuals around the globe?

Contact us to begin the donation process!