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, died on February 22 at home in Pacific Palisades. She was 90. Schweitzer-Miller was born in Alsace, Germany, in 1919, her father’s only child. She studied in Germany, France and Switzerland. After marrying and raising four children, she became a laboratory technologist, working for her father, and took charge of the laboratory at his hospital in Lambar’n’, Gabon, after he died in 1965. During the Nigerian-Biafran conflict of the late 1960s, Rhena brought a group of Ibo refugee children to Lambar’n’, and cared for them until the war ended in 1970. She then took them back to Nigeria and was able to reunite many of them with relatives. She informally adopted one of the children and paid for his entire education, said her daughter Dr. Christiane Engel, a medical doctor and classical pianist. At that time, Rhena worked with Dr. David Miller of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, who was also in Nigeria as the chief medical advisor to the Nigerian Red Cross. After their work together in Nigeria, Rhena and David were married and lived in Georgia. They worked together on nutritional surveys in India, Bangladesh, South Vietnam, Ethiopia, Egypt and Haiti. From 1979 to 1983, they worked in the Yemen Arab Republic on projects of primary health care, and in 1984-85, in Pakistan for refugees from Afghanistan. After David died in 1997, Rhena moved to the Palisades to be close to Christiane and her family. The Engels built an ocean-view apartment for Rhena in the front of their home along Paseo Miramar. She loved nature and the wild things that she observed in her new home: a family of skunks, squirrels and birds. In addition, she was accompanied by her beloved cat, Kitty, who was there on her bed when she passed away. ‘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,” said Dr. Lachlan Forrow, president of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. Christiane will take her mother’s ashes back to Lamb’ren’ to be buried alongside her parents’ graves. In addition to Christiane, Rhena is survived by her three other children, Monique Egli, Philippe Eckert and Catherine Eckert; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Contributions may be made to the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, 330 Brookline Ave. (BR), Boston, MA 02215.
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