Hospital of Hope
by Judith Zwolak
Photography by Paul Dyment

In the morning, you wake to the high-pitched squeals of a pig, protesting the ropes that restrain his limbs in preparation for slaughter.

If you're accustomed to rising to the jarring but comfortably inanimate buzz of an alarm clock and encountering bacon only as a cellophane-wrapped package in the grocery store freezer aisle, this morning ritual at Haiti's l'Hôpital Albert Schweitzer is a fitting introduction to life in a region so different from your own.

A country of contradictions, Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world but was once one of the richest colonies in the Caribbean. The health of many of Haiti's residents closely mirrors the country's economic status; Haitians commonly suffer from malnutrition and all types of infectious diseases. A single place of hope in the populous and particularly poor Artibonite Valley region of Haiti is the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, founded in 1953 by William Larimer Mellon, who graduated from Tulane's School of Medicine that same year.

In his middle 30s, Mellon, a member of the wealthy Pittsburgh family, fell under the spell of Schweitzer, the Nobel laureate, physician and humanitarian who ran a rural hospital in the African country of Gabon. Following in his mentor's footsteps, he enrolled in medical school, became a physician and built a hospital that has survived nearly half a century in a country with a paucity of industry and natural resources and more than its share of political discord and poverty.

Mellon died in 1989, but his spirit lives on in his wife, Gwen, and in the Haitians and the foreign volunteers who staff the hospital. One such volunteer is Tulane's own Paul Dyment, vice president of academic affairs at the Tulane University Medical Center, professor of pediatrics and director of the university's Student Health Center.

Dyment has volunteered his services as a pediatrician at the hospital and elsewhere in Haiti for a few weeks each year for the past three years. When he retires this year, he will devote two months of each year to working in the hospital.

Like Mellon and so many other doctors, Dyment's inspiration to give of his time and expertise came from reading about Schweitzer.

"When I was premed, I read everything Albert Schweitzer had written," Dyment says. "Anyone who reads about his works is inspired."

Enlightenment from Africa

An armchair historian and teacher of the course on the history and philosophy of medicine on both of Tulane's campuses, Dyment begins every slide show on his experiences in Haiti with a short history about the hospital and the country.

"Forty years ago," Dyment says, "Dr. Mellon went to Tulane medical school late in life, knowing he was going to set up a hospital and knowing it was going to be in Haiti."

To trace the history of l'Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, one first has to travel to another hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, then French Equatorial Africa. In 1913, at age 30, Albert Schweitzer, an acclaimed authority on Bach, theologian and newly graduated physician, formed a hospital in an impoverished region of Africa and devoted his life to improving the health care for the area's residents. In 1952 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and philosophical writings.

News of Schweitzer and his hospital had spread worldwide when a 1947 article in Life magazine on his works reached the desk of William Larimer (Larry) Mellon at his ranch in Arizona.

As described in biographer Peter Michelmore's book, Dr. Mellon of Haiti, Larry Mellon was something of a misfit among others of his social standing. Son of Pittsburgh financier and industrialist Andrew Mellon, Larry Mellon had decided early in his life to pursue an unconventional career path. Shunning Princeton after his freshman year, he married hastily and endured a brief stint in the family banking business before heading out west to try his hand at cattle ranching. Settling in Arizona, Mellon's spirits soared and so did his ranch's profits. His marriage, on the other hand, came to a hasty finish when his young wife visited from Pittsburgh and saw the tiny shack her husband called home. In addition to the ranch, Mellon devoted himself to his music and study of languages (he played a variety of instruments and was fluent in numerous languages).

It didn't take Mellon long to find a woman who shared his love of the outdoors and industrious work ethic, however. Also newly divorced, Gwen Grant Rawson worked at a nearby ranch teaching horseback riding to support her three children. They were married after Mellon's tour of duty in World War II and it was with Gwen that Larry sat down and read the Life article on Albert Schweitzer after a hard day's work on the ranch.

Although the article made a big impression on both, Gwen was stunned when Larry announced he was going to quit the ranch, go to medical school and start a hospital for the poor. And it was with hesitation that Tulane University School of Medicine dean Max Lapham admitted the 37-year-old ex-rancher, college dropout and reluctant millionaire. Gwen trained as a lab assistant and worked at the school while Larry earned his degree.

Tulane was no picnic for Larry, who first enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences to take the required premedical courses. Once in medical school, he had to struggle to make average grades. Gwen worked tirelessly in a nearby laboratory, hardly ever seeing her husband. Schweitzer himself took an interest in Mellon and wrote to him with encouragement and suggestions. The Nobel laureate counseled his protégé to concentrate on anatomy, physiology and surgery in medical school and refrain from choosing an esoteric thesis topic.

Mellon had yet to choose a location for his own hospital when he sailed to Haiti to study tropical ulcers for his med school research project in 1952. There, he found a spot where a hospital was desperately needed. It was the Artibonite Valley, long denuded of its rich mahogany forests and suffering from an abundance of residents and a scarcity of fertile land. The 610-square-mile area held 180,000 people, with only two small public health clinics to serve them. Haitian president Paul Magliore granted the Mellons some land and buildings on the site of an abandoned Standard Fruit Co. banana plantation in the small town of Deschapelles. They started construction of the modern facility in the backwoods some five hours north of the teeming city of Port-au-Prince.

Today, the hospital building itself has changed little from when it opened in 1956. The 108-bed, one-story, fieldstone hospital has two operating rooms, a laboratory, X-ray facilities and a pharmacy. The hospital has its own water system, electric power, machine and vehicle shops, laundry and food services.

Although the physical structure of the main hospital is much the same, the services and programs have expanded to include 12 satellite health clinics staffed by trained Haitian volunteers and preventive and community education activities with a special emphasis on HIV and women's health. Annually, hospital staff members perform about 2,000 surgical procedures and see more than 60,000 people in the outpatient clinic. Nearly 100,000 outpatients are treated each year in the outlying health clinics. Haitians make up 90 percent of the hospital staff of 550.

Most of the area has no electricity, limited access to safe water and no community sewer system. Contact is limited to e-mail four times a day for 15 minutes or mail delivered each day from Port-au-Prince by a hospital driver.

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