Rhena Schweitzer Miller, the only child of Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who carried on his medical missionary work in the West African country of Gabon after his death in 1965, has died. She was 90.
Ms. Miller died of natural causes Sunday at her daughter’s home on the west side of Los Angeles, according to Dr. Lachlan Forrow, president of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship.
Although Ms. Miller was not close to her famous father until the last years of his life, she embraced his “reverence for life” philosophy and helped organize the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, which has supported the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, for nearly 70 years. She ran the hospital from 1965 to 1970.
She led a relief effort for Biafran refugee children during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s. Later, with her physician-husband, Dr. David Miller, she conducted health-care projects in several underdeveloped countries.
“Rhena was an extraordinary woman in her own right, embodying fully her father’s ethic of reverence for life and his insistence that ‘my life is my argument,'” Forrow said.
Several years ago Ms. Miller discovered a trove of correspondence between her parents, who spent most of their married life apart. “The Albert Schweitzer-Helene Bresslau Letters, 1902-1912,” published by Syracuse University Press in 2003 with an introduction by Ms. Miller, shed light on Schweitzer’s intellectual development and the influence of his wife, who founded a home for unwed mothers at the turn of the 20th Century and later worked with him as his anesthesiologist in Lambarene.
Schweitzer was an Alsatian physician, theologian, musicologist and concert organist who with his wife established a hospital for lepers in Lambarene in 1913. Tormented by the misery he saw there, he developed a philosophy that stressed the unity and interdependence of all life and devoted the next 50 years to his medical missionary work. His achievements were honored with the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms. Miller was born in Strasbourg, France, on Jan. 14, 1919, her father’s 44th birthday. When she was about 6, her father returned to Gabon, but she remained in Europe with her mother, whose delicate health ruled out the challenges of living in equatorial Africa. She grew up, married and had children largely outside of her father’s presence.
Despite their separate lives, she absorbed his moral teachings about the sanctity of even the lowest forms of life. He would not allow her to pick wildflowers, for instance, and if they came across a worm stranded on a sidewalk, “he made me pick it up out of the sun,” she recalled in an interview some years ago, “and carry it back to the grass.”
Although she wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, he forbade her from studying medicine, a decision that hurt her deeply, Forrow said. Schweitzer was temperamental and “not the saint some people made him out to be,” Ms. Miller told the Saturday Evening Post in 1994, “but he was an exceptional human being, I’m quite sure.”
In the late 1930s she and her mother made two trips to the United States to raise funds for the Schweitzer Hospital and mobilize support for the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Founded in 1940, the non-profit group has sent scores of graduate medical students to work in Lambarene as well as in underserved communities in the U.S.
When her mother died in 1956, Ms. Miller wrote to her father suggesting a reunion on their birthday. He invited her to Lambarene and somewhat reluctantly agreed to let her become his lab technician. She studied in Zurich for two years and returned to Gabon in 1960 with her diploma. Soon after, he surprised her by making her the head of his laboratory.
Just before he died in 1965 at 90, he surprised her again by asking her to run the hospital for him. “He didn’t even prepare her totally for it,” said Ms. Miller’s daughter, Dr. Christiane Engel, “but he had a big admiration for her and also realized that humanitarian work was the essence in her life.”
Ms. Miller had four children with her first husband, Jean Eckert, who built organs for Schweitzer. In addition to Engel of Los Angeles, she is survived by three other children; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
She married Dr. David Miller in 1970. A researcher for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and chief medical adviser to the Nigerian Red Cross, he worked with her through the 1970s. He died in 1997.
