Dr. Julius Jacobs was a Dutch colonial physician and ethnographer, author of Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh — Family and Kampong Life in Groot-Atjeh — published in 1894. The book is one of the principal pre-war sources for the social institutions of Groot-Atjeh: the gampong and mukim organisation, the household economy, and the legal condition of women, children, lepers and slaves.
The Leprosy Account
Broersma cites Jacobs’s account of the lepers in Groot-Atjeh in his chapter on the leper colony at Bajan. Jacobs had recorded that ‘de lijders in Groot-Atjeh onverbiddelijk werden verstooten’ — the sufferers in Groot-Atjeh were inexorably banished — and that they might withdraw to a particular kampong with sulphurous hot springs. The leper’s immovable property fell to his family, and his wife was reckoned legally divorced from him. The leper-kampong thus formed ‘een kleine maatschappij van rampzaligen’ — a small society of the wretched — in which, so far as the sufferers were able, fields, crafts and fishery were kept up. Jacobs noted that leprosy was then less frequent in Groot-Atjeh than on the eastern coast, where Pidië and the Pasé-streek were worse afflicted.
The Pepper Harvest of 1893
Broersma’s second use of Jacobs is for the pepper-harvest of 1893, when ‘geen peper van beteekenis werd geoogst’ — no pepper of consequence was harvested — an item in the long wave of boom-and-bust that Broersma traces from Kruyt’s 1873 figure down to the disease-year of 1918.
Significance
Jacobs’s Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh is regularly cited alongside Snouck Hurgronje’s Atjèh for the ethnography of the period before the Dutch military consolidation, and is the principal medical-ethnographic source for the condition of lepers in pre-pacification Atjeh.
See Also
- Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh
- Groot-Atjeh
- Leproserie in Atjeh
- Pepper cultivation in Atjeh
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- 1893
- 1894
Source
Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh, by Dr. Julius Jacobs (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1894). Cited in Verkenningen in Atjeh by Dr. R. Broersma, pp. 25, 30.