Paul Carlson

Life and Ministry

Paul Carlson was born at Culver City, California, in AD 1928, the son of Swedish-American Evangelical Covenant parents, trained as a physician at George Washington University and Stanford, and served briefly in private practice before answering a short-term medical call to the Évangélique Covenant mission at Wasolo in the equatorial Congo in AD 1961. Returning permanently in AD 1963 with his wife Lois and their two children, Carlson became the sole physician for a district of some hundred thousand people on the Ubangi River, operating a sixty-bed hospital, training Congolese nurses, and translating medical instruction into Lingala. He continued in his post through the unrest that followed Congolese independence and refused repeated American consular advice to evacuate, on the ground that the Wasolo people would have no doctor if he left.

Circumstances of Death

When the Simba rebellion swept through Stanleyville in August AD 1964, Carlson was arrested while attempting to evacuate Lois and the children downriver and was held with some sixteen hundred foreign hostages in the Victoria Hotel. He was paraded as a confessed CIA spy in show trials staged for Radio Stanleyville, the charge being unsupported but useful to the Simba command. On the morning of 24 November AD 1964, as Belgian paratroopers of Operation Dragon Rouge dropped onto Stanleyville airport, the hostages were herded into Patrice Lumumba Street and machine-gunned by their guards. Carlson was shot dead climbing the wall of a sheltering verandah, three feet from rescue, in the final volley before the paratroopers reached the street. His body lay where he fell until the Belgians recovered it that afternoon.

Legacy

Carlson's death made the cover of Time magazine for 4 December AD 1964 and became, for the postwar American Protestant mission, the iconic image of the Christian doctor who would not leave his post. His witness is that the gospel of Christ goes wherever the body of Christ is willing to go, and that the medicine of the Great Physician is administered not from safety but from the place of need. The hospital at Wasolo carries his name and continues, sixty years after his death, to serve the people he refused to leave.