Hoogerheide was a Dutch ophthalmologist, who died young, and who took his doctorate under Prof. van der Hoeve at Leiden on a dissertation concerning three thousand eyelid operations performed on Java. He was cited by Dr. J. Tijssen in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) as the precedent for the village eye-surgery method that the Indies press had wrongly named after Tijssen himself.
The precedent
Tijssen rejected the term methode-Tijssen used of his work in the Atjeh campaigns. The operation itself, he said, was one devised by great thinkers over the centuries; and the idea of going into the villages and operating on the spot, instead of waiting for what came into the hospitals, was “allerminst origineel.”
“Eenige jaren geleden is bij prof. van der Hoeve de helaas te jong gestorven oogarts Hoogerheide gepromoveerd op een dissertatie over drieduizend ooglid-operaties op Java.” — Some years ago the eye doctor Hoogerheide, who alas died too young, took his doctorate under Prof. Van der Hoeve on a dissertation about three thousand eyelid operations on Java. Tijssen invited his interlocutor to consider what material was worked up in such a thesis, treating so many operations of a single kind. Such a body of cases could never have been assembled by work in hospitals: “Daar komt het nooit bijeen.” Hoogerheide too, he added, had worked in the kampong and had performed operations in all possible and impossible places.
Significance
The Hoogerheide dissertation supplied Tijssen with two things: proof that the village method yielded case material unobtainable in institutional practice, and an academic precedent that removed from his own Acehnese campaigns the character of an eccentric personal enterprise. In the same passage Tijssen named the parallel precedent of Elliot in Britsch-Indië.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Prof. van der Hoeve
- Elliot
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Java
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. 7–8.
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.