Prof. van der Hoeve was the professor of ophthalmology at Leiden under whom the eye doctor of Atjeh, Dr. J. Tijssen, worked as assistant between his years as a plantation doctor in Atjeh and his return there in 1929, and under whom the ophthalmologist Hoogerheide took his doctorate on three thousand eyelid operations performed on Java.
Tijssen’s assistantship
Tijssen’s career as recorded in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) ran: sixteen years as a plantersdokter in the south of Atjeh, at Langsa; then Leiden, where “later in Leiden heeft hij gewerkt als assistent bij prof. van der Hoeve” — later at Leiden he worked as assistant to Prof. Van der Hoeve; then a return to Atjeh in 1929, not to the hospital but to the kampongs. Elsewhere in the same account it is said that Tijssen went at his own cost, after a long practice as plantation doctor and a short assistantship at Leiden, to Borneo and Atjeh.
The Hoogerheide dissertation
The second reference to Van der Hoeve concerns the argument by which Tijssen denied the originality of his own village method. Some years earlier, he said, “is bij prof. van der Hoeve de helaas te jong gestorven oogarts Hoogerheide gepromoveerd op een dissertatie over drieduizend ooglid-operaties op Java.” — 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. The reader would understand, Tijssen observed, what material was worked up in such a thesis, treating so many operations of one kind; it could never have been collected by work in hospitals — “Daar komt het nooit bijeen.” Hoogerheide too had worked in the kampong and had performed operations in all possible and impossible places.
Significance
Van der Hoeve’s Leiden clinic thus stands in the account as the metropolitan institution through which both the technique and the intellectual justification of Tijssen’s Acehnese campaigns passed: the technique by way of his own assistantship, and the justification by way of the Hoogerheide dissertation, which supplied the precedent for treating village mass surgery as scientifically fruitful and not merely charitable.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Hoogerheide
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Leiden
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- 1929
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. 3, 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.