Rouwenhorst, Wilhemina

ERFGOED

1905-2000

Wilhelmina Rouwenhorst

Thanks to the Limburg University Fund a video with Wilhelmina Rouwenhorst (1915-2000) playing the lead could be digitalized. She was the second female professor of this university and played an important role as a ‘founding-mother’. In June 1981, 66-year-old Rouwenhorst was appointed by Royal Decree to an extraordinary chair in Health Education and Information at the State University Limburg, in part at the instigation of the Netherlands Association for Prevention and Health Promotion. A little over one year after her formal retirement in May 1980, she thus became the first professor of health information and education in the Netherlands. One year before, Hans Philipsen (1935), then founding dean of the General Faculty, had hired her as a consultant in the context of the new field of Public Health Sciences. This was an experimental field in the Netherlands, and it consisted of three programmes: nursing science, health facilities policy and management, and public health information and education.

Rouwenhorst, one of the pioneers in the field of health information, had a long career behind her already, when she began to work for the State University Limburg. After graduating from high school (ULO) in Zeist, she earned a certificate in ‘Utilitarian Needlework’, followed two years later by one in ‘Fine Needlework’. Next, she became a teacher at the agricultural and domestic science school in Goor and Markelo. As of 1948, she worked in technical education in the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia in 1949. She subsequently held various leadership posts, contributing between 1952 and 1955 to the development of an Indonesian teacher training college in technical education. In late 1955 she was back in the Netherlands, where until 1963 she had a job as inspector for vocational training facilities with the commissariat of care for Ambonesian migrants at the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Welfare. In addition, after passing a special entrance exam, she embarked on a Social Sciences study at the State University Utrecht in 1958. In 1968 she earned an MA, writing a thesis on the implementation of health education and health information ‘in a changing context of health problems and health care’. One year before, she had also completed a Master in Public Health at the University of Minnesota. From mid-1963, Rouwenhorst had worked as a consultant for health information and education with the General Netherlands Green Cross Association and, after its merger with other cross organizations, with the National Cross Association. In 1977 she earned a PhD by writing a dissertation on “learning to be healthy” (Leren gezond te zijn?). Three years later she formally retired.

After her retirement, however, Rouwenhorst continued to be quite actively involved in her field. For example, she continued to work for the Netherlands Association for Prevention and Health Promotion, which she had co-founded. But she was also active in various administrative roles for the National Cross Association, the Netherlands Asthma Foundation, the Foundation for Smoking and Public Health, the Study Centre Integration Healthcare Foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) and the Netherlands Association for Combatting Rheumatism. Clearly, Rouwenhorst was a pivotal player within the domain of health information and health education. This is also why she fitted perfectly in the plans developed at Maastricht with regard to Health Sciences. That apart from her dissertation she published fairly little was not an impediment for her appointment as chair. Her ‘writing energy’, as she felt, was largely spent on the many daily duties that came with her job, including the writing of memos, discussion papers and position papers on all sorts of aspects of health information and education.

In part owing to Rouwenhorst’s efforts, a specific curriculum was developed for Health Information and Education as a degree subject. Furthermore, she was the key actor at the first conference on Health Information and Education held in Maastricht in October 1981. This conference attracted as many as 600 participants. The topic was ‘slightly fashionable’ at the time, as she put it. At this conference, she argued that the essential task of health information and health education was to involve people actively in caring for their own health and that of others.1 A patronizing approach was to be avoided at all cost! As argued by Klasien Horstman, who in the early 1980s was a staff member in the Department of Theory of Health Sciences, her work marked a departure from explicit moralism and paternalism, making way for a scientific approach to prevention and health promotion.2 Preventive interventions ought to be guided by scientific insights in healthy behaviour, rather than by moralistic views. In 1983 Rouwenhorst retired from her post as professor. The Netherlands Association for Prevention and Health Promotion continues to honour her life and work by organizing the annual Wilhelmina Rouwenhorst Lecture. The accompanying film features her valedictory address as well as an extensive interview with her.

by Annemieke Klijn