Ankie Borgstein van Wijk
BMJ 2019; 364 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l233 (Published 16 January 2019) Cite this as: BMJ 2019;364:l233- Johannes Borgstein
Ankie Borgstein van Wijk lived on to just beyond the age of 93 and dedicated at least 60 years of her life to paediatrics and her small farm just outside Blantyre in Malawi.
Born in 1925, the only child of an eminent citizen from Gouda, Netherlands, she grew up a solitary child, rarely accompanying her parents on holiday, being sent instead to various summer camps. After high school she went on to study medicine in Utrecht, starting just before the second world war. During the war some of the lectures continued clandestinely, and she had to sit for exams at the professors’ homes.
Meanwhile she worked for the resistance, ferrying messages concealed under the saddle of her bicycle between various resistance cells. Had these been discovered she would have been summarily executed. Her father meanwhile spent several years during the war as a German hostage, incarcerated in the local jail. Ten hostages were randomly selected and executed for every German soldier killed by the resistance, so her resistance work must have occasioned a great deal of soul searching
After the end of the war she met Jan, a fellow medical student, who was to become her husband and the love of her life. She never fully recovered from his untimely death at the age of 52, although she outlived him by 39 years.
They were married in 1951 and made plans both for a large family (seven sons in the space of nine years), and to move out of Europe. Chile as a first choice was discarded owing to administrative restrictions, and their interest turned towards Africa. In early1960, having finished his surgical training, Jan requested an appointment with the undersecretary for colonial affairs in London. The Foreign Office must have assumed he was a representative of the Dutch government, …
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