seofere.blogg.se

Technology, control, and the human body are common concerns for historians of medicine and the African continent alike.

How are we to understand such episodes in the context of surgical practices at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, in Africa more generally, and indeed in the wider contemporary world? The passage illustrates common peculiarities of the doctor-patient relationship it implies the importance of technology in surgical practice, in this case anesthesia it hints at surgery’s need to control procedures and all involved parties and it evokes questions on how individuals understand the body. The native responds: ‘thank you dear Dr Schweitzer’ – ‘Say: thank you dear Miss Maria’ (the nurse assisting in the operation room) ‘thank you dear Miss Maria’ – ‘Say thank you Piere Piebé’ (the black auxiliary in the operation room who is also assisting) ‘thank you, Pierre Piebé’ – ‘And now finally say: thank you Monsieur Schleich’ ‘thank you Monsieur (and now something that very remotely sounds like Schleich is being articulated)’ Because the Natives cannot pronounce Sch. The ceremony goes as follows: ‘Say thank you, dear Dr Schweitzer’. I insist that the natives are trained towards an appreciation of gratitude. When I operate myself, there is a ceremony of gratefulness at the end of the intervention when the patient is dressed, but before he is brought away. He elaborated on this in a passage worthy of being quoted at length:

A photograph of Schleich hung on the wall of the operating theater in Lambaréné, because Schweitzer wanted his patients to meet their ‘great benefactor from face’.

Moreover, the ‘natives’ considered general anesthesia ‘something scary’ and would therefore favor being subjected to other methods of anesthesia, the most frequent being infiltration anesthesia, a technique developed by the German surgeon Carl Ludwig Schleich in the 1890s. In a letter to the German journalist Werner Gauss dated 7 July 1952, Albert Schweitzer complained that his surgical team often lacked an assistant who knew how to work with chloroform or ether.