The Militair Hospitaal te Koetaradja — the military hospital at Koetaradja — was the institution to which Dr. C. E. Gomperts referred the seriously affected patients of his eye survey of 1937, and whose eye-ear-nose-throat department provided the clinical material for his study of keratomalacie.
Role in the survey
Patients with eye diseases of a serious nature, and those coming into consideration for operative treatment such as cataract and pterygium, received from Gomperts an opnamebriefje — an admission note — for nursing in the Militair Hospitaal. This was the central practical difference between his method and the methode-Tijssen, under which operations were performed in the kampongs themselves.
Gomperts defended the referral policy on the ground that operating in the villages “vervreemden we de bevolking nog meer van de ziekenhuizen” — estranges the population still further from the hospitals — undoing in a relatively short time what had been obtained by long and laborious labour.
The out-patient graph
To rebut Tijssen’s apparent fear that the population could not be moved to seek admission to existing hospitals, Gomperts printed a graph of the numbers of Atjehnese out-patients and admissions at the eye-ear-nose-throat department of the hospital from 1934 to and including 1937 — almost exclusively eye patients — divided into men, women and children, with values plotted to 360. The graph, he held, “levert het bewijs, dat deze opvatting van Tijssen niet juist is.”
The keratomalacia cases of 1937
Eighteen xerophthalmia patients with corneal changes — twelve boys and six girls, Atjehnese and other children — were nursed in the hospital during 1937 and tabulated by Gomperts with their findings on admission and their outcomes. A further table records the infections and infectious diseases among the xerophthalmia patients nursed in the hospital during 1936 and 1937: among them cases with bowel complaints, with framboesia, with malaria (quartana), with worm infections, with lung disorders (bronchitis, bronchopneumonia, pneumonia), with pyodermia and other suppurating inflammations including otitis media, with kidney disorders, and one with bladder stone and otorrhoea.
Gomperts noted that fairly many Atjehnese children were admitted “in zeer deplorabelen toestand” — in very deplorable condition — bearing the traces of long illness with all manner of complications, and yet showing no trace of perceptible signs of xerophthalmia, a fact he set against the prevailing ideas about the nature of the disease.
Surgical comparison
The hospital’s Officieren van gezondheid eye specialists provided the comparison group for Gomperts’s assessment of Tijssen’s surgical results: of 22 eyes they operated on, 2 were lost (9 per cent) and the result was good in 91 per cent, against rather more than 35 per cent good results in the 17 eyes operated on by Tijssen. Gomperts noted that at least fourteen of the sixteen patients operated on by the military eye specialists were treated by operators with shorter practical experience than Tijssen.
One patient in the comparison had been operated on in the sick-ward at Langsa rather than at Koetaradja.
See Also
- Koeta Radja
- Methode-Tijssen
- Keratomalacie
- C. E. Gomperts
- J. Tijssen
- Oogheelkundig kampongonderzoek in Groot-Atjeh (Maart-December 1937)
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.