Gido Siregar was a young Batak physician stationed on the island of Samosir in the Tobameer for the combating of leprosy, who in 1933 assisted the Dutch ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen in the trachoma campaign recounted in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934). Tijssen made a point of naming him: “de arts, dien ik er vond, zijn naam mag vermeld: Gido Siregar.”
Position on Samosir
Tijssen recorded that three Dutch missionaries worked on Samosir and that there were three small mission auxiliary hospitals on the island, but that real medical care had not existed until, a year before his visit — that is about 1932 — a young Batak physician was posted there for the combating of leprosy. In the field of ophthalmology, he said, the terrain was as unworked as the whole of the Indies.
Collaboration with Tijssen
Siregar proved willing to comply with the wish of the D.V.G. — the Netherlands Indies public health service — to assist Tijssen. To Tijssen’s great joy it appeared that he had performed trachoma operations as assistant to Prof. Bakker at Batavia.
This proved decisive. When Tijssen asked one of the native chiefs to bring the blind and eye-sick of his district and visited the market-day centres, it appeared that among the candidates there was not a single cataract, but “trachoom en nog eens trachoom.” Tijssen had never performed trachoma operations; he knew from the books precisely what trachoma was, but only one who has seen a trachoma district, he said, knows what trachoma means. It was therefore Siregar, “mijn Batakschen vriend,” who performed the operations at Ambarita while Tijssen worked with him.
Ambarita
At Ambarita, Tijssen had selected twelve old women for operation. It was not possible to explain to them what was going to happen. When the first lay on the table to be treated by Siregar, she began to scream terribly, followed on the instant by the other eleven; some hours were spent as in one of the most terrible pits of Dante’s Inferno. The next morning the bandages came off and there was great satisfaction. More than two hundred people were operated on in one month, some on all four eyelids.
Significance
Siregar is the only indigenous physician named in the two Simavi letters, and his presence illustrates the point Tijssen pressed throughout: that the decisive shortage was not of scientific knowledge but of practitioners willing and equipped to work outside the hospitals among village populations. Tijssen’s account credits Siregar with the technical competence that he himself lacked in this particular field.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Trachoma campaign on Samosir (1933)
- Samosir
- Ambarita
- Prof. Bakker
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Batak people
- 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.