2 I. HOW I CAME TO BE A DOCTOR IN THE FOREST 
and pain just as much as we do, nay, much more, and 
has absolutely no means of fighting them. And just 
as Dives sinned against the poor man at his gate 
because for want of thought he never put himself in 
his place and let his heart and conscience tell him what 
he ought to do, so do we sin against the poor man at 
our gate. 
* 
* * 
The two or three hundred doctors whom the Euro- 
pean States maintain as medical officers in the colonial 
world could undertake only a very small part (so I 
argued to myself) of the huge task, even if the majority 
of them were not there for the benefit, first of all, of the 
white colonists and the troops. Society in general 
must recognise this work of humanity to be its task, 
and there must come a time when doctors go out into 
the world of their own free will, but sent and supported 
by society and in numbers corresponding to the need, 
to work for the benefit of the natives. Then only 
shall we be recognising and beginning to act upon the 
responsibility in respect of the coloured races which 
lies upon us as inheritors of the world’s civilisation. 
Moved by these thoughts I resolved, when already 
thirty years old, to study medicine and to put my 
ideas to the test out there. At the beginning of 1913 
I graduated as M.D. That same spring I started with 
my wife, who had qualified as a nurse, for the River 
Ogowe in Equatorial Africa, there to begin my active 
work. 
I chose this locality because some Alsatian mis- 
sionaries in the service of the Paris Evangelical Mission 
