Prof. Bakker was the professor at Batavia under whom the Batak physician Gido Siregar had performed trachoma operations as assistant before he assisted Dr. J. Tijssen in the Samosir trachoma campaign of 1933.
The connection
Tijssen recorded his relief on discovering the fact. Having found on Samosir not a single cataract among the candidates presented to him but only trachoom, and never having performed trachoma operations himself, he found that the young Batak physician posted there for the combating of leprosy was willing to comply with the wish of the D.V.G. to assist him: “Tot mijn groote vreugde bleek hij als assistent bij prof. Bakker in Batavia trachoom-operaties te hebben verricht.” — To my great joy it appeared that he had performed trachoma operations as assistant to Prof. Bakker at Batavia.
Significance
The reference is brief but of some importance in Tijssen’s argument. It shows that the technical competence for mass trachoma surgery existed in the Indies, in the person of an Indonesian physician trained at Batavia, and that what was lacking was not skill but deployment: on Samosir, an island of nearly a hundred thousand people with three small mission auxiliary hospitals, there had been no real medical care at all until a year before Tijssen’s visit, and in the field of ophthalmology “was het terrein even onbewerkt als heel Indië is.”
See Also
- Gido Siregar
- J. Tijssen
- Trachoma campaign on Samosir (1933)
- Trachoma
- Dienst der Volksgezondheid
- Batavia
- 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. 12–13.
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.