Humanitarian - Martyr - Saint rankings (continued)
20. Warren Buffett
19. John The Baptist
18. Maurice Pate
17. St. Nicholas
16. Andrei Sakharov
xx. Oskar Schindler (UNRANKED)
14. St Francis of Assisi
13. Helen Keller
12. St Peter
11. Eleanor Roosevelt
10. Henry Dunant
9. Simon Wiesenthal
8. Martin Luther King
7. William Wilberforce
6. Desmond Tutu
5. Mother Teresa
4. Joan of Arc
3. Jonas Salk
Tier 1
2. Humanitarian Florence Nightingale
Humanitarian
(John Maddens Lunchbox 11.13/213th pick - 7th of category) post #4149
Wiki bio
"The Lady of the Lamp
Florence Nightingale is the founder of modern nursing. She transformed nursing into a respectable profession and set the standards for clean, safe hospitals in the world. Florence is honored as the first great nurse of the world. Her picture hangs on the wall in many hospitals.
Florence went to the Institute of Deaconesses in Kaiserswerth, Germany, to learn about nursing. At this time, nurses learned through experience, not through training. Florence treated sick people, distributed medicine, and assisted during operations.
In 1854, England entered the Crimean War. Florence and a team of 38 nurses went to the Crimea (near Turkey) to help the wounded soldiers. The military hospitals were dirty and run down. Florence made sanitary improvements which helped bring the death rate down from 40% to 2%.
Florence was kind and gentle with the soldiers. She would talk with them and comfort them as she made her rounds. This gave the soldiers hope. When Florence made her rounds at night, she carried a lamp with her to light her way and became known as "The Lady with the Lamp."
During Florence's time, the hospitals were overcrowded, poorly run, and disease infested. They were doing more harm than good. Florence thought hospitals should help patients, not hurt them. This was a revolutionary idea at the time.
Florence wrote Notes on Hospitals explaining how to make improvements to hospitals. She believed hospitals needed better ventilation, more windows, improved drainage, and less cramped conditions. With Florence's guidance, hospitals became clean and sanitary places where lives were saved, not lost.
Florence also became an expert on designing hospitals. Foreign rulers sought her advice when building their hospitals. Soon, hospitals throughout the world were being built according to her ideas.
Today, we still see how Florence has improved hospitals. The flowers, recreation rooms, and bright wards are an influence of Florence's work.
Florence thought nurses should learn through both experience and training. In 1860, Florence opened the first training school for nurses. It was called the Nightingale Training School, and the nurses were called Nightingale Nurses. Today, the Nightingale Nurses carry on Florence's work of caring for the sick and the poor.
Florence created high standards for the nursing profession. These standards helped transform nursing into the respectable profession we know today. Florence's writings continue to provide excellent resources for nurses and health care providers. Her book, Notes on Nursing, spells out the principles of nursing.
The founder of nursing. Nufced.
The bio for the number one Humanitarian is ridicuously long. It is also worthwhile to read about one of the finest men to ever walk the face of this planet.
1. Albert Schweitzer
Humanitarian
(thatguy 6.06/106th pick - 4th of category) post #2592
Albert Schweitzer (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a German theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine) of the German Empire. Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at his time in certain academic circles, as well the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus Christ who expected and predicted the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa). As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ reform movement (Orgelbewegung).
Schweitzer's passionate quest was to discover a universal ethical philosophy, anchored in a universal reality, and make it directly available to all of humanity. This is reflected in some of his sayings, such as:
"Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
Medicine
At the age of 30, in 1905, he answered the call of "The Society Of The Evangelist Missions of Paris" who were looking for a Medical Doctor. However, the committee of this (Roman Catholic) French Missionary Society was not ready to accept his offer, considering that his Lutheran theology was "incorrect". He could easily have obtained a place in a German Evangelical mission, but wished to follow the original call despite the doctrinal difficulties. Amid a hail of protests from his friends, family and colleagues, he resigned his post and re-entered the University as a student in a punishing seven-year course towards the degree of a Doctorate in Medicine, a subject in which he had little knowledge or previous aptitude. He planned to spread the Gospel by the example of his Christian labor of healing, rather than through the verbal process of preaching, and believed that this service should be acceptable within any branch of Christian teaching.
Even in his study of medicine, and through his clinical course, Schweitzer pursued the ideal of the philosopher-scientist. By extreme application and hard work he completed his studies successfully at the end of 1911. His medical degree dissertation was another work on the historical Jesus, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus. In June 1912 he married Helene Bresslau, daughter of the Jewish pan-Germanist historian Harry Bresslau.
In 1912, now 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 the Gabon, in Africa (then a French colony). He refused to attend a committee to inquire into his doctrine, but met each committee member personally and was at last accepted. By concerts and other fund-raising he was ready to equip a small hospital, taking satisfaction that Bach himself had assisted in the enterprise. In Spring 1913 he and his wife set off to establish a hospital near an already existing mission post. The site was nearly 200 miles (14 days by raft) upstream from the mouth of the Ogooé at Port Gentil (Cape Lopez) (and so accessible to external communications), but downstream of most tributaries, so that internal communications within Gabon converged towards Lambaréné.
In the first nine months he and his wife had about 2,000 patients to examine, some traveling many days and hundreds of kilometers to reach him. In addition to injuries he was often treating severe sandflea and crawcraw sores (washing with mercuric chloride), framboesia (using arseno-benzol injections), tropical eating sores (cleaning and potassium permanganate), heart disease (treated with digitalin), tropical dysentery (emetine (syrup of ipecac) and arseno-benzol), tropical malaria (quinine and Arrhenal (arsenic)), sleeping sickness, treated at that time with atoxyl, leprosy (chaulmoogra oil), fevers, strangulated hernias (surgery), necrosis, abdominal tumours and chronic constipation and nicotine poisoning, while also attempting to deal with deliberate poisonings, fetishism and fear of cannibalism among the Mbahouin.
Frau Schweitzer was anesthetist for surgical operations, using chloroform and omnipon, a synthesized morphine derivative. After briefly occupying a shed formerly used as a chicken hut, in autumn 1913 they built their first hospital of corrugated iron, with two 13-foot rooms (consulting room and operating theatre) and with a dispensary and sterilizing room in spaces below the broad eaves. The waiting room and dormitory (42 by 20 feet), were built like native huts, of unhewn logs, along a 30-yard path leading from the hospital to the landing-place. The Schweitzers had their own bungalow, and employed as their assistant Joseph, a French-speaking Galoa (Mpongwe) who first came as a patient.
When World War I broke out in summer of 1914, Schweitzer and his wife, Germans in a French colony, were put under supervision at Lambaréné (where work continued) by the French military. In 1917, exhausted by over four years' work and by tropical anaemia, they were taken to Bordeaux and interned first in Garaison, and then from March 1918 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. In July 1918, after having been transferred via Switzerland to his home in the Alsace, he was a free man again. At this time Schweitzer, born a German citizen, obtained French nationality. Then, working as medical assistant and assistant-pastor in Strasbourg, he advanced his project on The Philosophy of Civilization, which had occupied his mind since 1900. By 1920, his health recovering, he was giving organ recitals and doing other fund-raising work to repay borrowings and raise funds for returning to Gabon. In 1922 he delivered the Dale Memorial Lectures in Oxford University, and from these in the following year appeared Volumes I and II of his great work, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics. The two remaining volumes, on The World-View of Reverence for Life and a fourth on the Civilized State, were never completed.
In 1924 he returned without his wife but with an Oxford undergraduate, Noel Gillespie, as assistant. Everything was heavily decayed and building and doctoring progressed together for months. He now had salvarsan for treating syphilitic ulcers and framboesia. Additional medical staff, nurse (Miss) Kottmann and Dr. Victor Nessmann, joined him in 1924, and Dr. Mark Lauterberg in 1925; the growing hospital was manned by native orderlies. Later Dr. Trensz replaced Nessmann, and Martha Lauterberg and Hans Muggenstorm joined them. Joseph also returned. In 1925-6 new hospital buildings were constructed, and also a ward for white patients, so that the site became like a village. The onset of famine and a dysentery epidemic created fresh problems. Much of the building work was carried out with the help of local people and patients. Drug advances for sleeping sickness included Germanin and tryparsamide. Dr. Trensz conducted experiments showing that the non-amoebic strain of dysentery was caused by a paracholera vibrion (facultative anaerobic bacteria). With the new hospital built and the medical team established, Schweitzer returned to Europe in 1927, this time leaving a functioning hospital at work.
He was there again from 1929-1932. Gradually his opinions and concepts became acknowledged, not only in Europe, but also worldwide. There was a further period of work in 1935. In January 1937 he returned again to Lambaréné, and continued working there throughout the Second War.
Missionary Work in Africa
Schweitzer considered his work as a medical missionary in Africa to be his response to Jesus' call to become "fishers of men" but also as a small recompense for the historic guilt of European colonizers:
"Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the coloured peoples] have suffered at the hands of Europeans? … If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the coloured races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible.
Rather than being a supporter of colonialism, Schweitzer was one of its harshest critics. In a sermon that he preached on 6 January 1905, before he had told anyone of his plans to dedicate the rest of his life to work as a doctor in Africa, he said:
"Our culture divides people into two classes: civilized men, a title bestowed on the persons who do the classifying; and others, who have only the human form, who may perish or go to the dogs for all the "civilized men" care.
"Oh, this "noble" culture of ours! It speaks so piously of human dignity and human rights and then disregards this dignity and these rights of countless millions and treads them underfoot, only because they live overseas or because their skins are of different color or because they cannot help themselves. This culture does not know how hollow and miserable and full of glib talk it is, how common it looks to those who follow it across the seas and see what it has done there, and this culture has no right to speak of personal dignity and human rights…
"I will not enumerate all the crimes that have been committed under the pretext of justice. People robbed native inhabitants of their land, made slaves of them, let loose the scum of mankind upon them. Think of the atrocities that were perpetrated upon people made subservient to us, how systematically we have ruined them with our alcoholic "gifts", and everything else we have done…We decimate them, and then, by the stroke of a pen, we take their land so they have nothing left at all…
"If all this oppression and all this sin and shame are perpetrated under the eye of the German God, or the American God, or the British God, and if our states do not feel obliged first to lay aside their claim to be "Christian" — then the name of Jesus is blasphemed and made a mockery. And the Christianity of our states is blasphemed and made a mockery before those poor people. The name of Jesus has become a curse, and our Christianity — yours and mine — has become a falsehood and a disgrace, if the crimes are not atoned for in the very place where they were instigated. For every person who committed an atrocity in Jesus' name, someone must step in to help in Jesus' name; for every person who robbed, someone must bring a replacement; for everyone who cursed, someone must bless.
"And now, when you speak about missions, let this be your message: We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers, crimes that are shrouded in the silence of the jungle night…"
Schweitzer was nonetheless still sometimes accused of being paternalistic or colonialist in his attitude towards Africans, and in some ways his views did differ from many liberals of the 1960s. For instance, he thought Gabonese independence came too early, without adequate education or accommodation to local circumstances. Edgar Berman quotes Schweitzer speaking these lines in 1960:
"No society can go from the primeval directly to an industrial state without losing the leavening that time and an agricultural period allow."
####has quoted Schweitzer as saying: "The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother," which #### criticized him for, though #### seems to acknowledge that Schweitzer's use of the word "brother" at all was, for a European of the early 20th century, an unusual expression of human solidarity between whites and blacks. Later in his life, Schweitzer was quoted as saying: "The time for speaking of older and younger brothers has passed."
Philosophy
Reverence for Life
The keynote of Schweitzer's personal philosophy (which he considered to be his greatest contribution to mankind) was the idea of Reverence for Life ("Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben"). He thought that Western civilization was decaying because it had abandoned affirmation of (and respect for) life as its ethical foundation.
In the Preface to Civilization and Ethics (1923) he presents the view that Western philosophy from Descartes to Kant had set out to define the objective, material world in the expectation that humanity would be found to have a special significance and value within it. But no proof of this was found, and as a result the rationalist life-affirmation of the Age of Enlightenment began to evaporate. So a split occurred between this materialist world-view, as knowledge, and the life-view, understood as will or volition, and expressed in the pessimist philosophies from Schopenhauer onward. Scientific materialism (exemplified in the arguments of #### and Darwin) revealed an objective world-process which was devoid of ethics, entirely an expression of the will-to-live.
Schweitzer stated that mankind must accept this reality that the objective material world is ethically neutral. Therefore it was necessary for Mankind to affirm a new Enlightenment by the rebirth of spiritual rationalism, by giving priority to volition, to ethical will as life-view, in order to define and build the structures of civilization. Mankind must choose to create the moral structures of civilization: the world-view must derive from the life-view, not vice-versa. Because the world is an expression of will-to-life, respect for life has to become the highest principle.
Implications
In a similar exaltation of life to that of ####, Schweitzer followed the same line as that of Leo Tolstoy. He wrote: "True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, and this may be formulated as follows: 'I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live'."
Life and love in his view are based on, and follow out of the same principle: respect for every manifestation of life, and a personal, spiritual relationship towards the universe. Ethics, according to Schweitzer, consists in the compulsion to show toward the will-to-live of each and every being the same reverence as one does to one's own. Circumstances where we apparently fail to satisfy this compulsion should not lead us to defeatism, since the will-to-live renews itself again and again, as an outcome of an evolutionary necessity and a phenomenon with a spiritual dimension.
However, as Schweitzer himself pointed out, it is neither impossible nor difficult to spend one's life and not follow it: the history of world philosophies and religions shows many instances of denial of the principle of reverence for life. He points[citation needed] to the prevailing philosophy in the European Middle Ages, and the Indian Brahminic philosophy as examples. Nevertheless, he contends that this kind of attitude lacks genuineness.
The will to live is naturally both parasitic and antagonistic towards other forms of life. Only in the thinking being has the will to live become conscious of other wills to live, and desirous of solidarity with it. This solidarity, however, cannot be brought about, because human life does not escape the puzzling and horrible circumstance that it must live at the cost of other life. But as an ethical being one strives to escape whenever possible from this necessity, and to put a stop to this disunion of the Will to live, so far as it is within one's power.
Schweitzer advocated the concept of reverence for life widely throughout his entire life. The historical Enlightenment waned and corrupted itself, Schweitzer held, because it has not been well enough grounded in thought, but compulsively followed the ethical will-to-live. Hence, he looked forward to a renewed and more profound Renaissance and Enlightenment, "in the course of which humanity will discover that the ethical impulse is the highest truth and the highest purposiveness..." Albert Schweitzer nourished hope in a humankind that is more profoundly aware of its position in the Universe. His optimism was based in "belief in truth". He persistently emphasized the necessity to think, rather than merely acting on basis of passing impulses or by following the most widespread opinions, common among those found ignoring the conflationary elements so apparent in religious identity.
Respect for life, resulting from contemplation on one's own conscious will to live, leads the individual to live in the service of other people and of every living creature. Schweitzer was much respected for putting his theory into practice in his own life.
Nobel Peace Prize and Other Honors
The Nobel Peace Prize of 1952 was awarded to Dr Albert Schweitzer. His "The Problem of Peace" lecture is considered one of the best speeches ever given. From 1952 until his death he worked against nuclear tests and nuclear weapons with Albert Einstein and ####. In 1957 and 1958 he broadcast four speeches over Radio Oslo which were published in Peace or Atomic War. In 1957, Schweitzer was one of the founders of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. On 23 April 1957, Dr. Schweitzer made his "Declaration of Conscience" speech, it was broadcast to the world over Radio Oslo, pleading for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He ended his speech, saying:
"The end of further experiments with atom bombs would be like the early sunrays of hope which suffering humanity is longing for."
In 1955 he was made an honorary member of the Order of Merit by #### of the United Kingdom. He was also a chevalier of the Military and Hospitaller Order of #### of Jerusalem. Schweitzer died on 4 September 1965 at his beloved hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. His grave, on the banks of the Ogowe River, is marked by a cross he made himself.
The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship sends third-year medical students to spend three months working as Fellows at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon on clinical rotations.
Sayings
* "Do something wonderful, people may imitate it."
* "Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity."
* "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats."
* "Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate."
* "A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives."
* "Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."
Congrats to all. Really great picks in this category, it has been a pleasure.
And yet you disrespect McLaughlin?!?! McLaughlin has done far more forms of music than Segovia, has worked with more far reaching musicians, and has a rep equal to or above Segovia. The only thing that Segovia has that McLaughlin doesn't is an older, European credibility, which has zero to do with music.
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And yet you disrespect McLaughlin?!?! McLaughlin has done far more forms of music than Segovia, has worked with more far reaching musicians, and has a rep equal to or above Segovia. The only thing that Segovia has that McLaughlin doesn't is an older, European credibility, which has zero to do with music.
It should have been #1 
It should have been #1 
but to be fair, so did almost every single other person in the draft...
