Elliot was a British ophthalmologist in Britsch-Indië who toured the country delivering the blind of their cataract, and whose reported figures at first raised astonishment and disbelief in professional circles in London. He was cited by Dr. J. Tijssen in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) as one of the two precedents — the other being Hoogerheide — that disproved any claim to originality for his own Acehnese village campaigns.
The Indian tours
Tijssen’s account is brief: “Elliot ging in Britsch-Indië op tournee en verloste er de blinden van hun cataract, de grauwe staar. Met een verband en een bril liet hij ze weggaan en ze kwamen niet terug. Genezen. Hij kwam in Londen met getallen, die in vakkringen verbazing en ongeloof wekten. Nu is de verbazing voorbij; plaats gemaakt voor geloof en bewondering.” — Elliot went on tour in British India and delivered the blind there of their cataract, the grey cataract. With a bandage and a pair of spectacles he let them go away, and they did not come back. Cured. He came to London with figures that raised astonishment and disbelief in professional circles.
The essential features of the method as described are those Tijssen himself adopted in the kampongs of Atjeh: mass operation on tour rather than in a fixed hospital; discharge of the patient with a dressing and a pair of spectacles; and no expectation of follow-up attendance, the cure being complete.
Significance
Elliot’s precedent mattered to Tijssen’s argument in two ways. It showed that the method worked at scale in another Asian colonial territory with a comparable burden of untreated cataract, and it showed that the initial incredulity of metropolitan specialists had in that case given way to belief and admiration — the trajectory Tijssen hoped his own figures from the North Coast and the West Coast of Atjeh would follow.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Hoogerheide
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- British India
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), p. 8.
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.