The author tells how, in July of 1913, as a 38-year-old medical doctor, he gave up his position as a respected professor at the University of Strasbourg and celebrated authority on music and philosophy in order to go as a physician to French Equatorial Africa (present day Gabon). The text is Schweitzer's own story of these years - a tale of his successful attempt to practice modern medicine and surgery in the face of wild elephants raids, marauding leopards, famine, flood and local superstition and ignorance.

This work is an account of five years' experience at Lambarene on the Ogowe River. Schweitzer is evidently a close observer, and he succeeds in giving a vivid picture of the monotony of life in the oppressive luxuriance of the tropical forest.

Albert Schweitzer, (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a French-German theologian, organist, philosopher, and physician. In 1912, armed with a medical degree, Schweitzer made a definite proposal to go as a medical doctor to work at his own expense in the Paris Missionary Society's mission at Lambaréné on the Ogooué river, in what is now Gabon, in Africa (then a French colony). In spring 1913, he and his wife set off to establish a hospital (Albert Schweitzer Hospital) near an already existing mission post.