Description

Norwegian by birth, Dr. Louise Aall studied medicine first in Germany and then Switzerland. She then chose to work as an itinerant bush doctor, setting up a clinic in Mahenge in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). There she was the first western physician to identify and treat a variant of epilepsy, now recognized by the World Health Organization as "Nodding Syndrome."

While working at her clinic in 1959, Dr. Aall was asked by the Red Cross to fly to Matadi in the Belgian Congo to manage a 300-bed hospital. Protected by United Nations soldiers from Morocco, she served as the hospital's lone bedside physician during the height of the civil war atrocities. Then In 1961, 86-year-old Dr. Albert Schweitzer asked her to work with him at his hospital in French Equatorial Africa (Gabon). In 1963, she immigrated to Canada with her new husband, gaining accreditation as a psychiatrist at McGill and then an anthropologist at UBC. Despite ongoing financial and geographical hurdles, her innovative treatment and rehabilitation programs for epilepsy in Tanzania continue to benefit thousands of African patients with "moon madness."