Calvin Schwabe has been professor of epidemiology, medical parasitology and tropical public health, and a researcher in medical and veterinary science, first in the American University of Beirut and, until recently, within the University of California. He also served as a member of the Secretariat of the World Health Organization in Geneva and remains a consultant to it and other UN agencies. Working mostly on health and food supply problems in the Third World, his other special concerns have included efforts toward realizing a Middle Eastern peace settlement and for improving the circumstances of Africa’s thirty-fifty million migratory pastoralists. Co-founder in the 1950s of Dar al asHab, a Quaker International Center in Beirut, he and his wife have sojourned among other groups of Quakers wherever they have worked. Members of Davis (CA) Monthly Meeting, they now live near Pendle Hill and attend Haverford Monthly Meeting.
This pamphlet describes the complementary roles Quakerism and science have played in Calvin Schwabe’s personal pursuit of a “gathered life.” From that experience he suggests the potential he believes more conscious understanding and cultivation of these relationships might portend for other individuals and society.