Framboesia — yaws, the disfiguring treponemal skin disease — was the volksgeesel (popular scourge) whose combating had formerly stood at the centre of the work of the Dienst der Volksgezondheid in Groot-Atjeh, and against which the striking successes obtained with salvarsan had, in Dr. C. E. Gomperts’s account, won the confidence of the Acehnese population for Western medicine.
The campaign and its consequence
Gomperts opened his report by placing the eye survey in this history: “Terwijl de framboesiabestrijding vroeger in het middelpunt van de belangstelling stond, hetgeen een logisch gevolg is van de frappante successen met salvarsan bereikt bij dezen volksgeesel, is in den loop der jaren ook voor andere volksziekten de belangstelling gegroeid en hoe langer hoe meer het vertrouwen van deze bevolkingsgroep in de Westersche geneeswijze gewonnen.”
The campaign against yaws was thus, in his narrative, the precondition of the eye survey: it had established the credibility of Western medicine among a population that had until then avoided it, and made possible the extension of the service’s work to other popular diseases in the five years before 1937.
Among the eye patients
Framboesia recurs in the survey’s own data. Among the kampong xerophthalmia cases it was recorded in 8 per cent of the boys and 3 per cent of the girls; among the general body of children examined, in about 2½ per cent of boys and 3 per cent of girls. Among the eighteen keratomalacia children nursed in the Militair Hospitaal te Koetaradja in 1937, two had framboesia; and framboesia figures among the infections recorded in the xerophthalmia patients nursed there during 1936 and 1937.
Gomperts nevertheless concluded that “de invloed van infectieziekten en infecties op het ontstaan van xerophthalmie niet duidelijk tot uiting komt” — the influence of infectious diseases and infections on the origin of xerophthalmie does not clearly express itself.
See Also
Source
Oriënteerend oogheelkundig onderzoek bij de Atjehsche bevolking van Groot-Atjeh gedurende 1937 (“Orienting Ophthalmological Survey among the Atjehnese Population of Groot-Atjeh during 1937”), by Dr. C. E. Gomperts, offprint from the Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië, Afl. 19, Deel 80 (1940), pp. 1191-1238 (Batavia-Centrum: G. Kolff & Co.). Received by the editors 25 October 1939. Offprint DLP-157, Bibliotheek KITLV.