The seven juvenile cataracts of Atjeh’s Westkust were seven cases of childhood blindness operated on by the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen in the district between Meulaboh and Singkel on the West Coast of Atjeh, and photographed as a group for the pamphlet Een strijd in Atjeh (1934). Tijssen described the series as one that had fascinated him, because it demonstrated that one could wait long with a cataract operation but that the chance of cure grew steadily less and after twenty years had wholly vanished.
The seven cases
All seven had gone blind between their first and third year of life. When Tijssen came to the West Coast of Atjeh they were respectively three, eight, ten, twelve, sixteen, twenty and twenty-four years old. None of them had in all that time been treated; not even examined. It was, he said, virtually certain that with timely intervention all of them would have been cured.
The first was a girl of three, “fel als een wilde kat” (fierce as a wild cat), who defended herself tooth and nail against examination and treatment. The first eye was operated on by surprise; the second with more difficulty. She had come on her father’s hand, stumbling more than walking. It was hard to establish afterwards whether the treatment had succeeded — until one morning she anxiously pulled her father along when Tijssen arrived. “Nu plukt ze voor een cent een bos bloemen uit mijn tuin. Witte, als ik om witte vraag. En roode, als ik roode wil hebben. Het wonder is werkelijkheid.” — Now she picks me a bunch of flowers from my garden for a cent. White ones, if I ask for white. And red ones, if I want red. The miracle is reality.
The second was a child of eight, who became Tijssen’s “succesnummertje.” One morning he saw him, to the amazement of his fellow villagers, playing football with a ball of paper in a coconut garden; for eight years they had known him in their midst as a stone-blind wretch. Such a case, Tijssen said, was splendid for the work: confidence came, and patients came.
The third was ten years old, photographed wearing trousers in pure Acehnese dress: a very intelligent child who understood what was going to happen to her. Tijssen remarked that an Acehnese child of ten was the equal of a Dutch child of fourteen. The results with this small patient were very good.
The fourth seemed to him a hopeless case: twelve years of total blindness had brought a misery through which the child appeared wholly stunted. To his great astonishment and joy a satisfactory result followed, which he had not expected, since the long blindness had already attacked the cornea and the retina; but what remained was preserved and the child could see, to its own great joy and that of its surroundings.
The three eldest — those of sixteen, twenty and twenty-four — he treated as far as anything could be attempted. So strong was the suggestion proceeding from the first four cases that these three young people themselves, and their parents and friends also, obstinately maintained to him that the treatment had helped and that they could see. “Ik weet helaas beter,” he said: solely because he had come too late, the ruined eyes were extinguished.
Tijssen’s conclusion
From the series he drew the moral that ran through the whole of his account: “Heb ik u niet gezegd, dat er vóór alles spoedig geholpen moet worden. Veel liever wat minder goed dan zoo verschrikkelijk te laat” — much rather a little less well than so terribly too late. He formulated the same rule in the idiom of the bridge tables of the ship on which the conversation took place: “speel slecht, maar speel vlug” — play badly, but play fast.
He explained elsewhere in the same account the physiological grounds: long blindness makes young children incurably blind; if older persons are blind long, longer than about five years, psychic changes set in which make the return of vision very difficult or impossible. “Er is geen lust meer om te zien. Men is vergeten wat licht is.” — There is no desire to see any more. One has forgotten what light is.
The West Coast journey
The seven cases were encountered on the journey Tijssen made after 23 August 1933, when he came again to Koeta Radja and travelled on to Bakongan. He had gone to the West Coast at the wish of the governor Van Aken, who had a weakness for that territory where he had worked for long years, and where, Tijssen thought, political motives may also have been decisive. The district he then travelled was a thinly peopled coastal strip five hundred kilometres long and scarcely five kilometres broad, with a motorable road running along its axis, flanked on both sides by mass graves recalling the many Atjeh wars and the rising of 1926, and a great monument marking the place where Teukoe Oemar fell. In the short time he was there he helped two hundred and forty-seven people with eye diseases and operated on twenty-four persons with cataract.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Atjeh’s Westkust
- Meulaboh
- Singkel
- Bakongan
- A. Ph. van Aken
- C. Graadt van Roggen
- 23 August
- 1933
Source
Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad), door Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, met een voorrede van den heer H. Wanting, redacteur Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg, uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934), pp. 8–11.
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad) by Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.