Samosir was the island in the Tobameer of northern Sumatra where the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen carried out the trachoma campaign of 1933 after leaving the West Coast of Atjeh at the beginning of the Poeasa. It is described at length in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) as the comparative counterpart to the cataract country of Atjeh.
Population and religion
Tijssen recorded that among the nearly hundred thousand people living there Mohammedanisme was unknown: ten thousand were Christian and the rest heathen. It was for that reason that he could work there during the Muslim fast, which made work on the West Coast of Atjeh impossible.
Description
He called the mountainous island the nearest to Paradise of all the districts he knew. “In de dalen ziet men overal de dorpen, elk in hun bamboe-omlijsting, als eilanden in het groen en geel der rijstvelden drijven.” — In the valleys one sees everywhere the villages, each in its bamboo framing, floating like islands in the green and yellow of the rice fields. Descending into those villages — the hoeta’s — one saw “de klassiek-Bataksche, streng gestyleerde huizen, elk sprekend van den kunstzin van dit volk,” — the classic Batak, severely stylised houses, each speaking of the artistic sense of this people, and sometimes in the centre the ancestral sarcophagus adorned with expressive carving, “uiting eener megalithische cultuur, die de bewondering van elk kunstgevoelig toeschouwer moet wekken.” — the expression of a megalithic culture, which must awaken the admiration of every artistically sensitive observer. Nature, the dwellings of the dead and the houses of the living together formed “een beeld van onvergelijkelijke schoonheid.”
But on entering those houses a thick, stinking smoke met the visitor: no air, no smoke-outlet; there the food was prepared; wood for burning was scarce and a kind of fern was burnt that gave enormous smoke. “En overal vindt men er de vrouwen van 40 jaar en ouder met halfblinde oogen bij het vuur.” — And everywhere one finds there the women of 40 years and older with half-blind eyes beside the fire. The men were on the sawah’s, the younger women with them or caring for the children. From this Tijssen derived his explanation of the sevenfold preponderance of women among his trachoma patients.
Medical provision
Three Dutch missionaries worked on Samosir and there were three small mission auxiliary hospitals. Real medical care had not existed until, a year before Tijssen’s visit, the young Batak physician Gido Siregar was posted for the combating of leprosy. In ophthalmology “was het terrein even onbewerkt als heel Indië is.”
Financing of the campaign
The population had no money, and against nothing was there so much suspicion as against what was offered for nothing; but Tijssen could work there for nothing, out of the surplus of the ten-cent bathing levy raised at the holy spring of Bakara — the episode recounted at Trachoma campaign on Samosir (1933).
See Also
- Trachoma campaign on Samosir (1933)
- J. Tijssen
- Gido Siregar
- Toba Lake
- Ambarita
- Bakara
- Trachoma
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- 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.