Rumble in the joint: uproar in casa academica

A university is just society at a small scale, of course. This of course includes peer fights and feuds, which sometimes get out of hand. Territorial urges and stealing territory are not rarely the cause. If the irreconcilability of personalities then comes into play too and the media get involved, you get real turmoil.

Fussing over operating rooms and clinics

Fights happen everywhere but at Medicine, the 1960s and 1970s were very turbulent. At the packed hospital building of the academic hospital situated at the Catharijnesingel and the railroad tracks, clinics and classrooms were jumbled together while the construction of the promised new hospital in De Uithof kept getting postponed. But at the same time, the number of specialisms which demanded their own clinics and operating rooms kept growing.

The Wieberdink Affair

Cardiovascular surgery was new in Utrecht at the time. In 1963, Professor Koos Wieberdink was appointed for this, but the truth was that there was no place for this specialism in the building anymore. Good counsel was expensive. Should it be put in the operating rooms of general surgery? The notoriously wilful Professor Nuboer was fully against it. Colleague Hulst from cardiovascular disorders really preferred not to move over either. And the Board of Nurses was not happy about it either. They already saw the writing on the wall, as there was a shortage of specialist nurses. On top of that, general surgery believed cardiovascular surgery belonged there.

The arrival of a new Professor of Cardiovascular Disorders (Frits Meijler) did not improve anything. As long as the new hospital was not built, there seemed to be no solution for Wieberdink either and the annoyances accumulated. A commission was finally founded in 1970, which concluded it was better for Wieberdink to leave.

Fights among medics became political

In the meantime, the number of deaths in cardiovascular surgery also turned out to be higher than could be expected, which was probably because it was a relatively young specialisation. But numbers are numbers. Wieberdink himself had already made the newspapers with quotes like “… amateurism among professors disastrous for medical degree programme”. In the press, the Utrecht problems were explained as a fight between conservatives and progressives, and that made everything public.

Wieberdink himself resigned and told his story in a book Open hartchirurgie (Open Heart Surgery), in which he also published documents related to the case. He blamed a number of colleagues at the faculty for “desperately holding on to gained authorities (…) instead of sharing and giving up responsibilities.” The social democrat Wieberdink subtly pointed out that in these turbulent times, the Utrecht medical faculty was the last in the country to “transition to recognising participation of lower staff members and students.”

Anaesthesia called into question too

Medicine did not have an easy time during these years. The smoke of the “Wieberdink Affair”, as the matter came to be called, had barely cleared or the next commotion already came knocking. The 1970-appointed anaesthesiologist Bob Smalhout held his inaugural lecture with the provoking title De dood op tafel (Death on the Table) in 1972, in which he pointed out the abnormally big number of deaths during surgery as a consequence of using anaesthesiology methods he believed were much too primitive. Smalhout subtly felt that public attention could benefit his specialisation and called upon the press more than once. That then led to fights and fusses with both the hospital and university boards. And here, too, the rift was never closed.

In the end, these fights had only losers: a spoiled work atmosphere, frustrated staff members, a promising new specialisation that just did not take off, and big reputation damage for both the university and the hospital. The entire matter also proved once again that it is disastrous to let problems fester for years without intervention. You sometimes need to cut through the red tape.