Long Poetoe was a kampong on the North Coast of Atjeh where the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen treated cataract sufferers during the North Coast campaign. The village is named in the caption of the cover photograph of Een strijd in Atjeh (1934): “eenige van de behandelde cataractlijders in de kampong Long Poetoe op de Noordkust van Atjeh” — some of the treated cataract sufferers in the kampong of Long Poetoe on the North Coast of Atjeh.
The photograph
The plate is the pamphlet’s opening image and one of the few photographic records of Tijssen’s Acehnese patients. It shows a group of villagers who had undergone the cataract extraction that Tijssen called “het wonder in handen” — a procedure simple in the scientific sense but speaking by its immediate effect to the simple of spirit, and therefore in his view a social act of significance.
Context
Long Poetoe belongs to the belt of North Coast villages in which Tijssen carried out the work described in the first of his three letters: eighty-three persons operated on in twenty-six days, in a small polyclinic building, in an administrative office and in a buffalo stable, at a cost to the government of very little money. It was in four small villages of this coast that in 1923 he had caused the blind to be assembled and had counted two hundred and twenty-six of them. The name is rendered in modern Indonesian orthography as Lueng Putu, in the Pidie district.
See Also
- J. Tijssen
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Noordkust van Atjeh
- Bernoen
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Vereeniging SIMAVI
- 1932
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), title-page caption and pp. 3–4.
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.