The trachoma campaign on Samosir was the month-long series of eyelid operations performed by the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen on the island of Samosir in the Tobameer in 1933, immediately after his journey through the West Coast of Atjeh. Although the campaign lay outside Atjeh proper, Tijssen recounted it in the same series of conversations printed in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934), and it forms the comparative counterpart to his Acehnese cataract work.
Why Samosir
Tijssen left the West Coast of Atjeh towards the beginning of the Poeasa, since among the devout Muhammadan population of that coast one could not work during the fasting month and the administration would not gladly have seen it. He therefore went to Samosir, where among the nearly hundred thousand inhabitants Mohammedanisme was unknown: ten thousand were Christian and the rest heathen.
The island
He described the mountainous island as coming nearest to Paradise of all the districts he knew. In the valleys the villages could everywhere be seen, each in its bamboo framing, floating like islands in the green and yellow of the rice fields. Descending into those villages, the hoeta’s, one saw the classic Batak houses, severely stylised, each speaking of the artistic sense of this people; sometimes in the centre stood the ancestral sarcophagus adorned with expressive carving, the expression of a megalithic culture.
But on entering those houses a thick, stinking smoke met one. There was no air and no smoke-outlet; there the food was prepared; wood for burning was scarce and a kind of fern was burnt that gave enormous smoke. Everywhere he found the women of forty and older with half-blind eyes by the fire; the men were on the sawah’s, the younger women with them or caring for the children.
Financing
He came as a stranger and wished to work among these people; the population had no money, and against nothing was there so much suspicion as against what was offered for nothing. But he could work there for nothing, and he explained how.
Some years earlier, when the malaise threatened the taxi drivers in their livelihood, some of those shrewd gentlemen discovered a miraculous spring that offered healing against all diseases. The spring was very remote, and the conveyance of the thousands of native bathers yielded the drivers in this country without railways a good plate of rice; more than a hundred thousand people they brought in a short time to the blessed spot — the holy spring of Bakara. No controlled cure took place, and several dysentery epidemics were traced back in their origin to it. To conjure away the great hygienic dangers of the busy visiting and the accumulation of so many people, the administration had to take some sanitary precautions and levied for that purpose a contribution of ten cents per bather. Of this money some thousands of guilders remained over, and out of that the administration now supported Tijssen’s work. Bakara, he added, was again quiet; the houses built there stood worthless and purposeless, and people pointed out the place to one another as a curiosity.
Collaboration with Gido Siregar
On Samosir three Dutch missionaries worked and there were three small mission auxiliary hospitals on the island. Real medical care had not existed until, a year before, a young Batak physician was posted for the combating of leprosy. In the field of ophthalmology the terrain was as unworked as the whole of the Indies. But the physician he found there — “zijn naam mag vermeld: Gido Siregar” — proved willing to comply with the wish of the D.V.G. to assist him, and to Tijssen’s great joy had performed trachoma operations as assistant to Prof. Bakker at Batavia.
Trachoma
For when Tijssen asked one of the native chiefs to bring the blind and eye-sick of his district to him on a given day, and visited the various centres on market days, it appeared that among the candidates there was not a single cataract, but “trachoom en nog eens trachoom.” He had never performed trachoma operations; he knew from the books precisely what trachoma was, but only one who has seen a trachoma district knows what trachoma means.
He described the disease: the eyelids fearfully inflamed and thickened, bent inward, moving the eyelashes like a brush over the eye; the hairs fall out and the young strong hairs scour the cornea to pieces like sharp needles and destroy the last of the sight remaining after the loss of the lashes. After years of torment, unbearable pain and endless misery, the disease at last runs out into complete blindness.
The patients were countless but preponderantly women. He found some who wore the sick eyelids bent up against the forehead, tied with a piece of string. He had to perform the operation seven times more often on women than on men, which he thought very remarkable, since the literature did not record that trachoma occurred with greater frequency in the female sex. Only when he had seen the life of those women in the houses did he get an inkling of the cause of the phenomenon.
Ambarita
At Ambarita he had selected twelve old women for the operation. It was not possible to tell them what was going to happen. When the first lay on the table to be treated by his Batak friend, she began to scream terribly, followed on the instant by the eleven others. They called for help, entreated and lamented in the most extraordinary ways; they named their condition with the saddest names, and the worst that they cried out to rouse the human feeling of the operators was: “Ach Heer, ik ben een oude weduwe zonder kinderen!” Must they not, Tijssen asked, have succumbed before so sad a fate? “Maar ik had de deur op slot gedaan.” — But I had locked the door. Some hours they spent as in one of the most terrible pits of Dante’s Inferno.
Then the twelve went away with bandaged eyes. The next morning the bandages came off; as well and as ill as they could, they looked at one another in astonishment, whispered and gestured, and there was great satisfaction. The trachoma was not cured: the eyelids had been shortened and bent upward. But the nagging pain that made every glance a visitation was over, and the destruction of the eyes had been brought to a stand.
More than two hundred people were operated on in one month, some on all four eyelids. Then personal circumstances called Tijssen away from Samosir, back to Europe.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Gido Siregar
- Samosir
- Toba Lake
- Ambarita
- Bakara
- Tijssen’s journey to the West Coast of Atjeh and Simaloer (1933)
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Trachoma
- 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. 12–14.
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.