Dr S. J. Halbertsma, arts te Rotterdam
What survives is his work, set down in official notices and in a medical journal's farewell. A newspaper account of the morning it was handed over records the gift that brings his name into this story.
The doctorate and the gift
We do not know exactly when he was promoted doctor. On 17 September 1895 he marked twenty-five years since he took his doctorate in medicine, which most likely puts the promotion around 1870; his Utrecht dissertation of 1869 is consistent with that, though it does not fix the date. The yearbook gives 17 September as the jubilee, while the newspaper reports that his patients made their presentation on the morning of 18 September. In its Stadsnieuws column a committee handed him a carved-oak book-cabinet set by Van Duffelen & Pelt, which the report called a meesterstuk (a masterpiece).
> City news. > > Today Dr. S. J. Halbertsma commemorates the day on which he took his doctorate twenty-five years ago. Numerous marks of interest from various quarters fell to the jubilarian's lot. A committee from among his patients presented him this morning at 9 o'clock with a splendid gift, together with an album containing the names of the donors. > > The gift is a carved oak set, sculpted and assembled in the workshop of Messrs. Van Duffelen and Pelt, Haagscheveer 34 in this city — a masterpiece of furniture-making that does great honour to its makers. > > There is, first of all, a large book-cabinet, an upper piece that is the actual cabinet and a lower piece that is a table with deep drawers for plate-work [prints/illustrated volumes]. This piece and the two others — a smaller book-cabinet and a chimney-piece facing — are of the finest oak and beautifully ornamented. Thus, carved in the large book-cabinet are the heads of the professors Donders, Niemeger, and Hidde Halbertsma; figures and human statuettes are cut in relief which together give fitting symbolic representations; elsewhere character-heads are sculpted. Mr. Miedema supplied the models for the various figures, and Mr. Fabri very ably painted the central panel of the chimney-piece as an imitation gobelin [tapestry]. Mr. A. Spoon furnished the design for the whole. These Rotterdammers together — Messrs. Van Duffelen and Pelt above all — have made a most splendid gift for the esteemed Rotterdam physician. > > On behalf of the committee, which had betaken itself to the jubilarian's home, he was addressed by Mr. Koch, who paid him tribute as a skilled and experienced physician and as a man, and expressed the wish that he might long be preserved for his patients and friends. How great the esteem is that his colleagues, too, bear the skilled and obliging man was proved by the gift — a magnificent pendulum clock [mantel clock] with matching candelabra in cuivre poli [polished bronze/copper] — which was presented to him an hour later by Dr. Klinkert, with a fitting word, on behalf of 32 doctors of medicine. > > Besides the two above-named gifts, the jubilarian received from all sides countless marks of friendship and esteem, while throughout the whole afternoon numerous visitors came to the salons — transformed into a flower garden — to offer their congratulations to the celebrating family.
The set was oak, the paper wrote, carved and assembled in the firm's Haagscheveer workshop, and it called the whole a masterpiece of furniture-making. The cabinet and its long afterlife have .
A public career
As the century turned, a pharmacists' weekly recorded his appointment, in a year-end notice, as a deputy member of the provincial medical council for Zuid-Holland from 1 January 1900.
For a time he also sat on the Rotterdam gemeenteraad (city council). The surviving report fixes the end of that service but not its beginning: it gives a letter of resignation dated 18 August 1907.
De Maasbode, 23 August 1907. In the report of the Rotterdam city-council meeting of Thursday 22 August (chaired by Mayor A. R. Zimmerman), among the incoming items: "From Dr S. J. Halbertsma, a letter dated 18 August last, giving notice that he is resigning as a member of the city council. — Noted."
The last honour
By Royal Decree of 15 September 1920 he was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau, and the official gazette recorded it in the flat language of an honours list.
Netherlands Government Gazette no. 181, 17/18 September 1920. Under "Appointments, pensions, etc.": "By Royal Decree of 15 September 1920 no. 37, Dr S. J. Halbertsma, physician, of Rotterdam, is appointed Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau."
Three plain words name him there: arts te Rotterdam (a physician of Rotterdam).
The farewell
His death comes down to us as a professional courtesy, not a civil act. A medical journal's in-memoriam probably places it in Rotterdam on 23 March 1925, after nearly fifty years of practice. It says he had twice sat on the governing board of the national medical society and probably stayed active on its support-fund committee until he died. Because the civil death act has not been consulted, the day itself is not settled: an earlier note in this research gave 24 March. He had been a doctor in Rotterdam for close to fifty years, and the state honoured him at the end of them. We do not have his face.